I 72,33 

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5 S 

LITTLE 
CLASSICS 



Class jbX mm 

Copyright)s^° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



s & s 

LITTLE CLASSICS 

Edited by Arthur D. Hall 



Henry Ward Beecher 



SELECTIONS FROM 

SERMONS 
LECTURES 
and 
ESSAYS 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 
STREET AND SMITH, PUBLISHERS 



I Two Co»4 



OCT, tr ISO? 



''7 



I:, 



copy R 



Copyright. 1902 
By STREET & SMITH 



Little Classics 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction ix 

Sermons. 

The Essence of Religion .... 3 

Christian Self-denial 13 

The Fruits of the Spirit . . . . ' 21 
Divine Compassion , . . . .26 
Christ's Way of Happiness . . . .3' 
Needless Care and Anxiety .... 33 

Heroism in Suffering 40 

Repentance 44 

ThE Divine Abundance .... 47 
Lectures. 

Industry and Idleness ..... 55 

Six Warnings 88 

The Parasite Waste . . . . • Ji3 
The Waste of Misfits . o . . • ' •? 
The Waste of Lying . . . . .122 
What Is Moral Intuition? , . . .130 
Evolution and Design . , , ." .137 

Evolution and Prayer 139 

Evolution and Sin 143 

American " Go." 147 

r 



Contents. 

PAGE 

Essays. 



A Discourse ot Flowers , , . . 


153 


Trouting ....... 


167 


Farewell to the Country 


175 


The Death of our Almanac . 


183 


Frost in the Window .... 


192 


Trust 


197 


A Rhapsody of the Pen Upon the Tongue 


200 


Purity of Character .... 


204 


How to Bear Little Troubles 


. 206 



vi 



Introduction. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most 
eminent of i\merican preachers and teach- 
ers, was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 
24, 181 3. He was the son of Lyman and 
Roxana Foote Beecher, and the eighth of ten 
children. His boyhood and earlier man- 
hood w^ere passed in poverty, and he had but 
few pleasures. In his early years, he did 
not exhibit any great fondness for books ; 
and an inflammation of the throat, resulting 
in indistinct speech, his great sensitiveness 
and diffidence and his bad memory gave no 
promise of the brilliant future in store for 
him. At the age of twelve he moved, with 
his family, to Boston, and was entered at the 
Boston Latin School. He afterward at- 
tended Amherst College, where he was 
graduated in 1834. Here he was the center 
of college fun, and a great provoker of mirth 
among the students, showing them that 
strong sense of humor which was one of his 
leading characteristics. Amherst was ex- 
changed for the Lane Theological Seminary, 
in Cincinnati, where his father, then recog- 
nized as a great orator, was president. At 
the close of his course in theology, he re- 
ceived and accepted his first call to a Presbv- 
terian church at Lawrenceburg, a small vil- 
ix 



Introduction. 



lage near Cincinnati. It wa^ a poor place, 
the church was small, and the congregation 
numbered only twenty people, of whom 
nineteen were women. He next removed to 
Indianapolis, where he remained for eight 
years, gradually winning a reputation as a 
powerful and eloquent preacher. It was 
while in Indianapolis that he wrote and de- 
livered his famous "Lectures to Young 
Men," two of which will be found in this 
collection. It was here also that he 
preached two sermons on slavery, which are 
said to have had all the effect of a bomb 
upon the congregation. 

In 1847 ^I^- Beecher entered upon his 
celebrated pastorate of the then new Ply- 
mouth Church, in Brooklyn. In his very 
first sermon he declared his intention of ut- 
tering, with no bated breath, his own views 
on war, on temperance, and on slavery. For 
forty years, until his death, ^larch 8, 1887, 
he remained at Plymouth Church, which he 
made renowned all over the country. Prob- 
ably no preacher has ever displayed greater 
personal magnetism (a much-abused term), 
a stronger command of language or a hap- 
pier facility of illustration. Added to this, 
he hid the invincible courage of his opinions, 
and he attacked with a boldness, which noth- 
ing could daunt, the vices and evils of social 
and political life. This made him a power 
in the church and in the community at large. 

X 



Introduction. 



In addition to his pastoral duties he was one 
of the founders and early editors of the In- 
dependent, the founder of the Christian 
Union, and its editor, and one of the most 
prominent of antislavery orators. 

In 1863 he went to England in order to 
do what he could to set that country right 
on the great question of slavery. The re- 
sult was a veritable series of platform bat- 
tles, especially with the public of Manches- 
ter and Liverpool. But his bravery, his con- 
summate oratorical skill, his unlimited good 
humor and the extraordinary quickness of 
his repartee w^on the day at last, and con- 
verted enemies into friends. 

Mr. Beecher's views broadened very much 
as the years went on. He insisted upon the- 
ological freedom, and for that reason with- 
drew from the New York and Brooklyn As- 
sociation of Ministers and Churches, in order 
that they should be in no manner com- 
mitted to his supposed heterodoxy. In limi- 
tations of grace, in mechanical verbal in- 
spiration, in a commercial atonement and in 
an everlasting hell he had no belief what- 
ever. His trust for the salvation of the 
world was not in doctrines but in the Chris- 
tian exhibition of love. Indeed, love, a5 will 
be seen in these pages, w^as what he insisted 
upon from first to last. He was ever ready 
to take up and study new ideas and to em- 
brace such as seemed good to him. A nota- 



Introduction. 



ble instance of this is his adopting and teach- 
ing much of the theory of evolution. The 
extracts given in this volume cover a large 
portion of ]\Ir. Beecher's career. The essays 
were written in the earlier days of his min- 
istry, w^hile the sermons were preached in 
England in 1886, and exhibit his very latest 
views. With the exception of the two ''Lec- 
tures to Young ]\Ien/' which are given in 
full and to which reference has already been 
made, the selections from the lectures are 
taken from those he delivered the last years 
of his life, when he was in the full fruition 
of his powers, and are the crystallized result 
of a long career of manifold experiences. 

Arthur D. Hall. 



xii 



Sermons. 



SERMONS. 



THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION. 

"But the greatest of these is love." — i Cor. 
xiii., 13. 

The roots of this chapter are in the pre- 
ceding chapter. It is a chapter of univer- 
sal experience, a chapter of contention about 
peace, and of quarrehng above love, and of 
all manner of collisions and supersessions 
and criticism — every man thinking that he 
had just the gifts that m.ade him chief — ly- 
ing over against each other in battle array in 
regard to orthodoxy, regularity, organiza- 
tion, authenticity. They had the gifts of 
speech, some of them, and used them ; they 
had the gifts of teaching and misleading; 
they had all sorts of gifts jumbled together, 
as we have seen them since in the ages, and 
may see them still if we have eyes to see. 
And the apostle says that there are endless 
varieties, but it is God that worketh in them 
all ; dififerent dispensations, different offices, 
functions, experiences, manifestations, but 
God is behind all that are true, and they 
have a certain unity in God. But while the 
apostle did not discredit what we may now 
more familiarly call the means of grace, he 
3 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



said, ''Have all gifts of healing? do all speak 
with tongues ? do all interpret ? But covet 
earnestly the best gifts. And yet show I 
unto you a more excellent way/' ''Shove 
the whole crowd out/' he says, "and let me 
show you the royal road/' And then he 
broke out into this magnificent hymn or 
chant of love; and there has not yet risen 
that man inspired upon harp or organ or 
other instrument, not Beethoven himself, 
that has been able to put into music, the 
grandeur of this anthem of eternity. \Ye 
shall hear it chanted there ! Thus this lofty 
chant broke forth, as it were, in celebration 
of the coronation of love, and then all 
ceased. It could be seen that love was the 
one crowned truth of the universe; that 
without it all things are vapid and useless, 
and with it all things, it might almost be 
said, are superfluous. 

But what is this love? We have a pale 
moonshine of sentimergtality that is some- 
times supposed to represent the Scripture 
love. j\Ien sometimes advocate a life of love 
and a theology of love, but have no idea of 
justice and of truth, of sound words of or- 
thodoxy; they advocate this luusli of love. 
Now, the love which is the basis and sum of 
Christianity is something grander than any 
specialization of affection known to man. 
Nor is there, if peradventure it do not some- 
what exist in the household, anything that is 
4 



The Essence of Religion. 



fit to be the type of that which the Spirit of 
God teaches us to be the love of Christianity. 
For it is not a mild and feeble amiableness ; 
it is not a kind of charity that forgives men's 
faults, because it does not feel that they are 
faults, and has no conscience rebounding 
from evil. It is not merely morality, indif- 
ferent to everything that is not regular, and 
without any quick sense of good or evil, of 
t,he beauty of the one and the odiousness of 
the other. It is large, robust, discriminating, 
full of rectitude itself and the love of recti- 
tude, full of moral discrimination, repulsed 
from evil and attracted to all that is beau- 
tiful and true and good. It is the whole man 
attuned to God's own nature, and, therefore, 
full of sympathy, full of kindness, full of 
fervent well-wishing to all sentient creatures. 
It does not disdain anything, the great love 
that God pours into great souls and little ; it 
does not disdain the flitting insect, nor the 
flocks and herds, nor the birds that build and 
sing; but it has its full disclosure among 
men. It is that quality which shines out 
with beneficence upon all. As God makes 
His sun to rise upon the good and the bad, 
and sends His rain upon the just and the 
imjust ; as He has a great orb of compassion 
and sympathy that showers down benedic- 
tion upon men without regard to station or 
condition, or even character, so that love, 
w^hen it is transmitted to human beings, is a 
5 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



compassion and a sympathy and a well- 
wishing that dodges nothing, reaches every- 
thing, descends to everything, is universal, 
continuous, habitual ; it is the altitude of the 
soul ; it is the disposition in its moods of ben- 
efaction, consideration, sympathy, love; and 
in that sense love itself is but a minor form 
of the great love. It asks nothing for itself ; 
it has no second thought; it asks only the 
liberty of bestowing kindness and affection 
and sympathy and all helpfulness. It sees 
faults, longing to correct them ; it sees sins, 
that it may heal them ; it is the soul's physi- 
cian going into the hospital where men are 
maimed and are sick, only to see how they 
may be succored and helped. It is the 
soul's whole atmosphere poured forth upon 
others. Thus it is not a faculty ; it is all the 
faculties and forces of the soul in a condi- 
tion of imparting benefit, at any rate well- 
wishing, to all creatures. And thus it is a 
miniature God set up in the niche of our 
soul. 

Now listen for a moment to this sweetest 
descant that ever was sung beneath the 
angel choir, and see if it does not compass 
substantially that which I have described 
rather than defined as the nature of a true 
Christian experience of love. 

''Love suffereth long.'' That does not 
seem very striking. It is very profound. 
You cannot tell the strength of one's love by 
6 



The Essence of Religion. 



the pleasure which he receives from loving. 
The test of loving is what any one is wiUing 
to suffer for the sake of the object beloved. 
All deep love takes the object, as it were, 
into its bosom ; carries its burdens, or would ; 
forgives its sin, or would ; suffers. And any 
man that has nobody to suffer for him in this 
world is God's orphan indeed. Children are 
blessed because there is a household love 
that suffers for them. There are no hearts 
in the union of love that do not know^ how 
to suft^er for each other. "Love suffereth,'' 
not once or twice, as if upon exhibition, but 
''long.'' Long as the chord on the harp vi- 
brates, long as the pipe of the organ, suita- 
bly ministered unto, sounds, so long the 
touched heart knows how to suffer for those 
whom it loves. 

'Ts kind." Kindness should certainly 
have a place somewhere; because piety is 
sometimes anything on earth but kind. It is 
acerb, it is stiff, it is homely, it is preten- 
tious ; it is very good and very ugly. Piety ! 
It is enough to make a man run away from 
church to see some pious people. But love 
is kind, love is good-natured, and that 
stands society in hand often more than con- 
science itself. Love is gentle and kind. 

''Love envieth not." Nobody envies be- 
low himself ; everybody envies those that are 
above him ; therefore envying is covetous- 
ness, or worse ; it is the recognition of good 
7 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



fortune, or of attainment, or of power, or of 
something else in those that are above, and 
the man is angry at their goodness because 
it rebukes his meanness or his Httleness. But 
love, never. You cannot bestow too much 
upon that which you love. A mother is 
sooner liable to bestow too much upon the 
babe of her bosom than a true heart to envy 
the gifts of those that are about him. What 
if they are better and more popular than 
you? Thank God that there is some one 
better and more popular than you. What 
if they are wiser than you? Thank God 
that there is one more star in the firmament 
above yourself. What if they have the com- 
mendation of men while you have the dry, 
bitter root to chew ? Thank God that some- 
where there is somebody that is not getting 
troubled as you are. There are tears 
enough and misfortunes enough, and there 
are burdens and cares laid on those that are 
eminent quite enough to keep them down in 
their ow^n estate. Love never envies any- 
body. And, judged by that test note, a great 
deal of religion is spurious. 

''Love vaunteth not itself.'' It is not a 
braggart; it does not every time it lays a 
golden egg rise from the nest and cackle. It 
'Vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up/' Oh, 
that there were some men that could be 
touched with a lancet ! How the puffed- 
upness would come down, and leave vacuity. 
8 



The Essence of Religion. 



Love "doth not behave unseemly," or un- 
civilly. It does not think that rude, hard 
words, an abrupt manner, a disagreeable 
honesty, are any more tests of sincerity and 
manhood than words that are agreeable to 
men. It is not uncivil. 

Love ''seeketh not her own.'' That golden 
word that had been almost lost by forgetful- 
ness luckily Paul brought into eternal re- 
membrance, remembering the words of Him 
who said, "It is more blessed to give than to 
receive.'' This heresy the world has not yet 
acceded to. Selfishness says, 'Tt is not or- 
thodox : every man for himself ; if every 
man took care of himself everybody would 
be taken care of ; as for the sinful, the weak, 
the ignorant, those that are out of the way, 
no matter for them ; take care of yourself ; 
make your strength selfishness ; make your 
knowledge selfishness ; call yourselves by 
holy names, and live like the devil." Love 
never does it. It "seeketh not her own." 

*Ts not easily provoked." A wonderful 
grace is that ! not easily provoked by things 
that are provoking; to stand in misunder- 
standing; to be yourself sensitive, and have 
all the insects flying in with stings on you, 
and not be irritated ; to have the armour of 
patience, this is an attainment much to be de- 
sired. There have been some specimens of 
it undoubtedly in the history of Christian ex- 
perience. 'Ts not easily provoked." 

9 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



''Thinketh no evil/' Now, that is too 
much. It cannot be expected that we 
should reach that ; that we should never have 
a secret pleasure in hearing some tale of a 
neighbor that thought himself pretty good; 
that we should never repeat it with smiles : 
''Well, you know, he is a good man, but 
good men have their faults/' So it comes to 
pass that these beautiful Christians sit down 
at a banquet like so many cannibals eating 
up the reputation of their neighbors. 
''Thinketh no evil ; rejoiceth not in iniquity." 
Cynics, men that pretend to have such a 
knowledge of the world, think they cannot 
be deceived by sham, don't believe in sin- 
cerity, don't believe that there is any virtue 
that will not yield to temptation, don't be- 
lieve but that every man has his price every- 
where. The man may seem saintly, ''Yes, 
but have you seen him behind the alcove?" 
If I am told that there is anybody very good, 
or very holy, or very just, or very pure, I 
wall be above such things as that, for the Di- 
vine love does not love such things — it 
"thinketh no evil, it rejoiceth not in in- 
iquity." It will not thread the common 
sewers of life for the sake of finding out the 
worst elements to feed on. Many a muck- 
worm does it. 

"Rejoiceth in the truth." No matter if it 
is your enemy of whom you hear something 
better than you had supposed ; be glad that 
10 



The Essence of Religion. 



the man is better than you thought he was. 
Your own church is good — of course — and 
all things are orthodox ; but the church over 
the way ! Ah ! learn some of the things that 
have developed the true Christian life there. 
You ought to rejoice and be glad ; no mat- 
ter where you see the truth of life, of duty, 
of self-denial, of holiness, accept it, and bless 
God that there is even a twinkling of heav- 
enly light in the dark passages of this world. 

''Beareth all things.'' Love is a burden- 
bearer, and it rejoices in its burden. The 
nursery is God's commentary on atonement 
and on moral government. For where on 
earth is there such an instance as the mother, 
w^ho counts it all joy to bear the child's fee- 
bleness and w^eakness and want, and by and 
by quarrelsomeness and sickness and aberra- 
tion? "Beareth all things," not saying 'Tf I 
had been tried with such and such a trial, I 
could have endured it, but this!'' There is 
no this in true love. It is everything, it is 
anything. 

''Believeth all things." It trusts men. It 
does not mean that it believes every fuga- 
cious heresy or every rambling novelty ; but 
it has a mind credulous, childlike, confiding. 
Count Cavour, the Italian diplomat, said he 
was satisfied from his experience that more 
mistakes would be made by not trusting men 
than by believing in them and trusting them. 
If that is true in Italy and in diplomacy, 
11 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



good heavens! where is it not true? ''Be- 
lieveth all things/' or, at any rate, if you can- 
not do that, ''hopeth all things/' 

''Endureth all things /' and you will have 
to do that if you undertake to walk through 
life with this kind of Christian love. 

Now I want to call your attention to the 
fact that this is the only note of true ortho- 
doxy in the New Testament. Let me refer 
you \o the Gospel of St. John, chap, xiii., 
V. 34: ''A new commandment give I unto 
you, that ye love one another.'' Even late 
down in the history of this world this com- 
mandment was given as ''new"; and if he 
were present to-day, our dear Lord might, 
without changing a letter, say ''A new com- 
mandment I give unto yott. As I have loved 
you in the greatness of the Divine compas- 
sion, in the largeness of the Divine sym- 
pathy, in the glory of the all-filling love in 
God, so love ye one another. By this shall 
all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye 
love one another." Now, do you want to 
know how to find out whether a man is a 
disciple? Go to the catechism: ''What is 
your belief in respect to f oreordination ? 
What do you think of predestination ? Do 
you believe in the Trinity? Do you believe 
in the total depravity of the human race ? Do 
you believe that men are effectually called, 
that they can do nothing to help themselves, 
that they are born without any good or any 
12 



Christian Self-denial. 



possibility of doing good, until they are 
regenerated by the grace of God ? By 
this time you begin to sweat. "Do you 
believe that an atonement was made to 
satisfy the law of God, that all men are 
under wrath and damnation until they 
are brought by the Spirit of God to ac- 
cept the benefits of the atonement of Jesus 
Christ,, so that His righteousness is made 
righteousness unto them ? Do you believe 
in all these things?" "Yes, yes; I believe." 
They swallow them at a gulp ! But I never 
yet have seen an examination for ordination 
or for admission into a church that dared to 
sound this note of orthodoxy, "Do you love 
one another?" Yes ; here it is, in the \\'ord 
of the Lord Jesus ; it is the one note by 
which we are to determine whether a man 
is orthodox or heterodox, whether he is con- 
verted or not converted. "By this shall man 
know that ye are 'My disciples, if ye love one 
another/' 

CHRISTIAN SELF-DEXIAL. 

Self-denial and cross-bearing, are we to 
understand by them that religion is, after 
all, an experience of well-borne sorrow ; 
that men are to begin on crutches, and limp 
on crutches all the way through their life? 

r^Ian is of a composite nature, and in the 
order of time and nature both, he is first an 
animal, and of all animals the latest in com- 
13 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

ing to himself. For there is nothing in all 
the earth so far from himself as a human 
being when he is first born, with eyes that 
cannot see, ears that cannot hear, hands that 
cannot feel, feet that cannot walk ; whatever 
there may be potential in him is undevel- 
oped, he is a mere sucking animal, and that 
at the lowest. The fly is a full fly in a minute ; 
a colt is a full colt in less than a week ; a calf 
comes to itself very soon — it has not got a 
great way to travel — but man has to travel 
a great way before he finds himself. He be- 
gins at the bottom, at zero, and gradually at- 
taches figures that give value to the zero on 
the way up. The things that are necessary 
for the animal life of a being in the material 
globe are very strong in him, as they must 
needs be, and so come the nourishing appe- 
tites that may easily be perverted into glut- 
tonness and drunkenness, also the protective 
elements which defend him against aggres- 
sion, as if they brought out in each indi- 
vidual the condition of human society when 
all were savage and every man's life de- 
pended upon his power of defending him- 
self ; combative, destructive, with a sense of 
his own personal w^orth and dignity which 
we now call pride, but which towered up in 
the early days as that element of selfness 
which it was his duty to defend in life. We 
are born animals, but not far along on the 
way we find beginning the buds of some- 
14 



Christian Self-denial. 



thing far more beautiful and noble than the 
animal, and they break out into fragrance 
and affection in the soul. After a time, if 
these be cherished, they rise from the mere 
domestic realm of personal relation into 
larger affection, into goodwill and benevo- 
lence; the man rises from instinct to intelli- 
gence, from intelligence in accepting the 
things obvious to the senses, the percipient 
intelligence, into reflective intelligence : and 
then by thought he ranges from the throne 
itself to the footstool, back and forth, with 
ever-widening circuits. Then we find that 
there is developed in those that still grow, 
liberty not restrained by philosophy or by 
any other thing of that kind ; but men that 
have an inspiration to develop come to the 
spiritual element, and as all below that had 
cognizance of things seen, as all truth had to 
come below that to the sensuous man, to the 
ear, to the eye, to the taste, to the hand, to 
form, and to visibility, so we come to the 
realm in which the invisible predominates, 
and we become the creators there, and 
fashion things not only after the manner of 
their combinations among us, but higher 
than that, we enter the realm of Faith — the 
great realm of imagination which, when it is 
sanctified in religious use, we call Faith, but 
which is a gift of God in all its shapes and 
forms. Already, while our roots are in the 
soil, our top moves in the great realm of 
15 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



Faith, and we have the power given us 
somewhat of God Himself, and we go forth 
touching with color, with proportion, witn 
all quality, the things that are not real, but 
are more real than things that are real. 

Now, in this great multiplicity of constitu- 
tion, to which I have given but the barest 
thought, in this richness of faculty there is, 
of course, a great contention which part 
shall govern. As in every commonwealth 
there must be an upper, and middle, and 
lower, so it is in the commonw^ealth of the 
human soul. By nature it is the animal that 
wants to predominate, but no! it is re- 
stricted, and to a certain degree qualified by 
the decencies of social life, that repress a 
thousand things that in the savage life are 
permitted to go forth free. And whenever 
any animal instinct would raise itself u]) 
against any purity of the household, ihn 
purity, the instinct of love says, ''Down ! 
down and it is denied. Man denies him- 
self ; the under is put under, that the upper 
may be regent; and whenever in the yet 
higher realm of duty, conscience, justice, 
equity, kindness, there rise up social affec- 
tions or animal instincts, then the higher 
quality in the mind says to the man, ''Be 
still ; rest — know your place" — and we deny 
ourselves again. And if we call, as St. Paul 
did, all the way through (for he was a Dar- 
winian without knowing it) — if we call a 
16 



Christian Self-denial. 

man a double man, the flesh and the spirit 
man, self-denial may be briefly defined as 
being the suppression of the under man by 
the authority of the upper man ; it is not de- 
nying things that are pleasant, but it is de- 
nying to ourselves the things that are in- 
ferior and wrong for the sake of giving as- 
cendency, blossom, and fruitfulness to the 
things that are right. That is the whole 
limit of self-denial and cross-bearing; it is 
the repression of the under by the upper; 
and it is painful or not painful just accord- 
ing to the rude and uneducated condition of 
the man. In itself the instinct of benevo- 
lence, when it is ripened into a principle of 
benevolence, gives more joy when it puts 
avarice down than would have come from 
avarice permitted to have its full range, a 
thousandfold. Where temper would burn 
and kindness suppresses it, the kindness fills 
the soul with a joy and a peace that never 
would be known by anger. Where the up- 
per qualities prevail, they grow luminous as 
they go up, they are sweeter as they ascend, 
they are nobler in every way, and the upper 
man, the topmost man, the man who loves 
God, conscious of the eternal, the invisible, 
and the immortal, that part of him is strung 
to a musical power that is not known in the 
grumbling base of the lower animal passions 
of mankind. So, then, self-denial itself, 
when you come to see exactly what it is, is 
17 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

that which we experience along the Hne of 
every single step of development in human 
life. I would fain be a musician — some 
youngster in my neighborhood is trying to 
be — and, oh, what work he makes of it ! I 
know perfectly well if I could be a Paganini, 
how beautiful it would be. But before a 
man gets there, he has to deny himself in a 
great many ways for a good while. Every 
time that a man, in the process of education, 
ascends from ignorance to knowledge, and 
from one department of knowledge to 
another, he has got to give up a good deal of 
bodily rest, a good deal of diffused and dis- 
sipating society and pleasure; he has got to 
limit himself in his directions. No man 
can become an eminent chemist without 
great self-denial ; no man can become a 
great geologist without great self-denial ; 
no man can learn languages without great 
self-denial. We do not call it self-denial in 
secular things, but when we find it men- 
tioned in Christian relations. Christian 
ethics, then it is an ecclesiastical something, 
which is very different. But self-denial 
does not belong to Christianity, it belongs 
to humanity. Self-denial is that by which 
we put down the inferior things for the 
sake of the ascendency of superior things. 
It rims in music, it runs in the painter's art, 
it runs in sculpture and in architecture, it 
runs in husbandry and in statesmanship, it 
18 



Christian Self-denial. 



runs everywhere. There is not in the 
world any way by which a man comes to 
himself in the higher realms, except by 
steps of self-denial ; and when Christ says, 
with larger scope and more profound spir- 
itual meaning: "If any man would come 
after Me, let him deny himself, and take up 
his cross and follow Me," it is a truth as 
wide as the spheres ; but how different in 
the understandings of men fromi what it 
was in the pronunciation of our ]\Iaster ! 

Well, when self-denial has become facile : 
when you have learned, if I might so say, 
the trade of self-denial, it not only becomes 
easy relatively, but it loses much of its pain- 
fulness. If in a family of robust children a 
child is governed from the beginning, it is 
easy for him to give up his will to parental 
authority ; but if the mother's love is so weak 
that she cannot dare to restrain her child, 
the child may run riot, and by and by, when 
the time comes when she attempts to re- 
strain him, she will have a time of it, and 
he will have a time of it. And so in re- 
gard to self-denial in religious life. If men 
were brought up to understand what it is, 
to identify it, and give it a large sphere in 
their daily Christian experiences, self-de- 
nial w^ould not be so very painful. I have 
got so that I do not den}' myself a whit in 
some things. I see a great many whose 
pockets I could pick, and they would very 
19 



Henry Ward Beecher, 

amply fill mine ; but I never do it. It is 
not because it is so very painful to restrain ; 
on the contrary, I should rather sufifer if I 
did do it. I behold a man's garden full of 
fruit and flowers; I do not leap the 
boundary and rob it. There is, it may be, a 
faint animal insinuation : ''It won't last him, 
and it will advantage you;'' nevertheless, 
there is a Chief Justice who sits up there 
and says : 'Tor shame ! for your own sake 
avoid it !" and it is for my own sake that I 
avoid it. I find no difficulty in regard to 
cheating and lying — that is, except in that 
form of incidental lying wdiich everybody 
practices. (Expressions of surprise.) I 
believe there are folks who do not lie in 
thought or in feehng; but they are all in 
heaven. On earth, when a man so lives 
that everybody can see him inside and out, 
from his perfect truthfulness — when a man 
speaks the truth absolutely he has got to be 
a man so good that the Lord does not keep 
him here long. I do not, of course, speak 
of vulgar bluntness, but I speak of that 
state of mind in which the love of the truth 
in the very inward parts prevails and domi- 
nates the life ; the yea is yea, and the nay 
is nay, and there is no shading oft of either 
of them. Every self-denial ought, there- 
fore, to give place to the pleasure of a 
higher quality. Where men are living in 
habitual self-denial they very soon eft'ace 
20 



The Fruit of the Spirit. 



the pain ; the subject passions learn to sub- 
mit so easily that there is very little sense 
of suffering. Now and then exigencies, 
now and then catastrophes come; now and 
then there is some great experience that 
goes athwart the life like a comet full of 
terror sweeping its train along; now and 
then there are new necessities ; but in all the 
ordinary commerce of life men ought so to 
deny themselves as to subdue the recurrent 
powers, and it becomes an established habit 
as easy as breathing itself. The great trou- 
ble of self-denial is that a man often denies 
himself something for to-day, and takes it up 
again for to-morrow; he denies himself in 
church and forgets all about it out-of-doors. 
It is the want of thoroughness in self-denial 
that makes it at all painful to men, except 
in occasional exigencies. 



THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT. 

'The fruit of the Spirit.'' That word 
''fruit" is a very great favorite in the New 
Testament and also in the Old Testament. 
Christ made it almost fundamental. There 
is the vine, and its bearing or not bearing 
fruit ; or, as an interpreter of Divine Provi- 
dence, it is pruned that it may bring forth 
more fruit. The quality of fruitfulness 
runs through the whole New Testament, 
latent, or obvious and expressed. "The 
21 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

fruit of the Spirit." ''Oh!" says the hier- 
arch, ''the fruit of the Spirit is organized 
churches, subordination to God's ministers, 
clear and definite instruction in fundamental 
doctrines, reverence and awe in the pres- 
ence of God, obedience of common folks to 
uncommon folks. That," say they, is "the 
fruit of the Spirit." But I do not read 
it here. "The fruit of the Spirit." 
Why, then, this world is God's garden — 
God's orchard. I should like to know 
the sort of things that God does like 
to raise in His garden ; I should like to see 
the list of His orchard, the fruit for which 
God sustains the garden, the orchard and 
the farm, for which His Providence con- 
trols events, for which the whole experience 
is blown as a sw^eet gale that blows away 
the winter and brings on the spring. The 
fruit of the Spirit, over which all God's sing- 
ing birds, in hymms and psalms of thanks- 
giving, do chant melody — the fruit of the 
Spirit — the end which is sought in this 
world among men by the Spirit, the ripe- 
ness which is the result of the fostering care 
of God's Spirit — what is it ? Catechism ? 
Not a word of it. Confession of faith? 
Not a word of it. And yet these are not 
necessarily to be rejected, they are not to 
be disallowed. "The fruit of the Spirit." 
What if a man, sending his children to a 
dancing school, should ever after insist 
22 



The Fruit of the Spirit. 

upon it that they should reverence the fid- 
dle and the dancing-master and worship 
them? What are these but mere mechani- 
cal appliances by which to teach grace and 
method? And so soon as grace and 
method are once organized into a person, 
the school at which he learned them goes 
behind and is forgotten. No child wall be 
an expert arithmetician that does not first 
dig in the mire of the common school ; but 
afterward he abandons that. When we 
read we do not stop to look at the spelling, 
unless we run against a false one, and then 
instinct brings us up. We become so 
habituated to it that we gather that which 
hovers over the letter, and is in the air, as it 
were, the meaning, and it is interpreted 
back by the heart, by the experience, by the 
affections. The fruit of the Spirit is that 
which is underlaid by culture, but culture 
itself is not it. The text is not the precious 
thing, it is the meaning in the text that is 
precious. A farm must have its imple- 
ments, but it is the harvest that is of value, 
and they are relative. If a man can make a 
good crop with the poorest instruments he 
is better ofif than his neighbor who has ten 
times better instruments but a poorer crop. 
And if a man can make out of heresies a 
better Christian life than another man does 
out of his orthodoxy, he is nearer to God 
than the orthodox man. This is not dis- 
23 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



owning instruments, not at all, but it is say- 
ing substantially that men are perpetually 
worshipers and idolators of outside means, 
and quite forget that their value depends 
entirely on what they produce. So we 
have in the world, in the religious world, a 
vast amount of the means of grace without 
much grace. And yet when men criticise 
these things, when faithful pastors under- 
take to set forth to their congregation that 
while instruments or means of grace are 
useful there is something higher and better, 
"Oh, dear ! dear they say, holding up 
holy hands in horror, "where is the end 
going to be if you take away the founda- 
tions?" The foundations are on the top 
in Christian character, not on the bottom ! 
Then what are these fruits for which re- 
ligion is established, for which churches 
and all forms of moral organization exist, 
without which, as the apostle declares in 
keenest ridicule, all religion is as sounding 
brass and tinkling cymbal? The noisiest 
instrument in the band is the emptiest one. 

Now^ listen to the fruits of the Spirit for 
which a Church is established and without 
the production of which it is like an empty 
field, for which all doctrinal schedules are 
ordained, without which they are but 
sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, for 
which all orders and regulations and meth- 
ods are framed, and if they do not bring 
24 



The Fruit of the Spirit. 



forth these there is no sacredness in them, 
and there is no irrehgiousness in trampling 
them under foot. It is the soul that God 
has filled ; it is the upper man where God is 
the cultivator, and husbandman, and fruit- 
erer; it is the higher man, not the under 
man. And here are the harvests. The 
fruit of the Spirit is — of course, it is — is 
what ? It is the one thing that carries in its 
bosom everything else ; it is the mother 
around which are gathered the group of 
children ; ''the fruit of the Spirit is lore.^^ 
You would not think it, to see how minis- 
ters act ; you would not think it, to see how 
converted Christians act ; you would not 
dream it by merely reading confessions of 
faith, which do not discard it, but which, as 
far as I can remember, scarcely ever men- 
tion it. Talk about orthodoxy, sound 
words, wise discrimination ! The mother 
of all things in the soul is love. I do not 
know what m.en do when they go into those 
great, dark cathedrals, and stoop down on 
pretense of praying, and sit in a kind of 
stupid reverence, and are shocked by any 
wild ebullitions of life ; or a congregation 
made happy by the luxuriant liberty of a 
sanctified soul. They do not know where- 
unto such things will grow. ''The fruit of 
the Spirit is love.'' 

And the very next thing to this word 
means God in us ; it is '"Joy/' How is that 
25 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



for sobriety? Stern-faced, sharp, critical 
man, that thinks a smile is the shadow of a 
coming devil, how is that? Love first, 
next joy. What is joy? It is the response 
of each of the higher faculties of a man's 
soul, when it is brought up to concert pitch. 
Every one of them tends to produce pleas- 
ure, joy fulness, alertness, liberty. 

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, 
peace What is peace? One would sup- 
pose it is going to sleep in church. One 
w^ould suppose it to be simply the absence 
of pain. Peace has a positive existence. 
When the soul in every part of itself is 
stayed upon some good center, upon God 
and Christ in the love of God — when every 
part of the soul ceases to be hungry, when 
it has no clamor, no sorrow, but is restful, 
glad, and perfectly composed, in a sweet 
harmony in itself, that is peace. 

DIVINE COMPASSION. 

We go wandering through the world 
with the outward and the lowest elements, 
and we go to the civilized part of the globe 
and take the elements that build up ex- 
terior kingdoms and advance commerce and 
science; we go on to the outskirts of the 
Church, and if we are fortunate enough not 
to get into one of these Babel churches, full 
of clamor and wrath, we begin to have the 
26 



Divine Compassion. 



sweet story of Jesus told ; but not until 
Jesus Christ is revealed to us as the interior 
heart of God, and we can lift up our eyes, 
and out of our own experience begin to feel 
"the love of God which passeth understand- 
ing," can we have any adequate conception 
of what it is to have Jesus to introduce us 
to our home, and to our Father, and to our 
sonship. Do you ask me, on any mere 
mosaic of texts, or any miserable doubts of 
one-footed philosophy, to throw^ Him away 
and to say, "I do not believe in the Divinity 
of Christ?'' He is my all; whom have I in 
heaven but Him? and there is none upon 
earth that I desire beside Him. 

I remark, secondly, that such a view of 
the central and dominant compassion of 
God to such a race as this is the only view^ 
that can be adapted to the history and con- 
dition of mankind. The old theories of the 
appearance of men upon earth, and the ar- 
bitrariness by which they had been neg- 
lected and doomed, seems to me to issue 
from the very pit of perdition. There is no 
account yet that can closely explain the 
facts of the appearance of mankind in this 
world, and of the slow development of the 
Divine economy among mankind. Why 
they should have been spread out through 
ages without light, without a sanctuary, 
without a Bible, without a ministry, without 
a Redeemer made known in Jesus Christ, 
27 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



who can tell? God can by and by, and I 
wait for Him to tell me. All my philosophy 
falls short. How can you explain the prov- 
idence of God in regard to nations as thev 
stand? There is that Continent of Africa 
that is overflowing with children, her tens 
of millions, yet so dark that if Africa were 
sunk to-day to the bottom of the sea, with 
the exception of a few that have been im- 
ported into it, the population might go 
down, and they would be no more loss to 
the world than the bubbles that would come 
to the top afterward — not a machine, not 
an invention, not a discovery, not a philoso- 
phy, not a work of any kind, not an institu- 
tion of civil life. You might sink all 
Africa to the bottom of the sea, and the 
world would not lose as much as one 
mechanic hand in the city of London. How 
are you going to explain that in the Divine 
economy? Then look at Asia, hardly bet- 
ter ; look at the isles of the sea. God's 
ways are strange and mysterious, I cannot 
explain them : but I believe they are ex- 
plainable when we shall have come to a 
higher point of view. At present, I say this : 
I believe that God is a God of compassion ; 
that He is working out a problem in which 
this world is not alone concerned ; and that 
when we shall rise to the eternity in which 
His throne is and are eclaircised, delivered 
from the bondage of the flesh and all the in- 
28 



Divine Compassion. 

terpretations which it gives to our spiritual 
life, I believe the fair fabric of the universe 
will rise before us with wonder. 

Come with me, if you please, to an organ 
factory. I will suppose that we are igno- 
rant of it entirely, and we are told that this 
is where the grandest musical instrument in 
the world is manufactured. We go into the 
factory, and wdiat do we see? Slabs of 
seasoned timber, all sorts of mechanical 
w^ork going on, harsh sawing, sharp filing, 
pounding, hammering. I say: "Is this the 
place where they have found out music ? Is 
this the place where they build organs, 
which you say are the very royal instru- 
ments of music?'' Then we go in and see 
the metals being rolled out, and shaped, 
and hammered. The men are twisting 
them, as they always do, and one pipe rep- 
resents, we will say, the wald flute, and 
another represents the ordinary fife, and so 
on. They put them in one by one, and all 
that you hear is — (I\lr. Beecher imitated 
the tone of the organ pipe.) They then 
take the tuning fork to see that it is of the 
right pitch and the right tone, and all day 
long you hear squawking and all sorts of 
sounds, and they tell you they are manufac- 
turing music ; and, heavens ! what music ! 
At last we go away, and I say what men 
say about the Church — it is a shame, it is a 
mere pretense. But one day as I stroll by 
29 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



a cathedral I step in; they have just had a 
new organ built, and some great interpreter 
of Beethoven is at the keyboard, and I heai 
that under-roll of thunder out of which 
rises up, all harmonious and all exquisite, 
tones that represent the birds of the air, 
and every other musical instrument in the 
world. The theme lifts me up, and as the 
sound rolls away through the vast arches I 
am entranced. A man says to me : ''That 
is the organ, now it is complete ; when you 
saw it building part by part, step by step, 
and pipe by pipe, it looked to you like any- 
thing on earth but a good musical instru- 
ment ; you were fooled, you judged on the 
whole by parts that were in process of de- 
velopment." AMien God shall have given 
tone to every stop of human nature, when 
the work of redemption shall have been 
completed, when all the outlying elements 
shall have been brought together into their 
relative positions, when God Himself shall 
sit at the keyboard and roll forth the song 
of redemption, then men will know that all 
their doubts and fears and disgust in this 
world were both unphilosophical and mis- 
erably mistaken. IsIry we live to see that 
great redemption day when God harmon- 
izes all the scattered elements of the experi- 
mental life on this earth, and doubtless in 
other worlds ! 



30 



Christ's way of happiness. 

Christ's way of happiness is not man's 
way of happiness. You are not happy in 
proportion as you are rich ; you are not 
happy in proportion as you are high in sta- 
tion, nor as you are in influence ; indeed, I 
often think that the more a man has of this 
world's goods and honors the less happy he 
is. I am happier than if I was rich — I am 
far from it; but I know the lives of rich 
men, and I would not be a rich man such as 
I have seen — no, not for all the globe if it 
were one solid mass of gold. For how do 
men get riches but by sacrificing too often 
humanity, knowledge, taste, refaiement, 
conscience? They win their souls to bribe 
]\[ammon withal. I have seen ships in the 
old days that lay oft a port, blown off the 
shore by adverse winds, steamers that could 
not make the harbor, fuel giving out, bulk- 
heads torn asunder, the inflammable cargo 
used to raise steam, beating against the 
wind and waves until they came into port 
at last all dismantled, and I have seen a 
great many rich men that came into the 
port of old age with everything torn out 
and burned up that should make them 
happy in their old age — empty, stripped, 
almost valueless. A man may seek in this 
world riches, and honor, and station, and all 
31 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

the pleasures that come from the appetites, 
the lusts, or the passions, and he sows to 
the wind and reaps the whirlwind, and life 
goes out with him at last, dark, and a 
clouded sun — no hope, no joy. And I have 
seen women from whose hand had been 
snatched everything that was dear in life 
except hope, and love, and trust; impover- 
ished, abused by drunken husbands, some- 
times — I have seen them when it seemed to 
me that they had nothing on earth to 
make them happy, while they said, ''I 
have everything on earth to make me 
happy; I am a child of the King, and 
He never leaves me nor forsakes me; I am 
happy because I am the Lord's." I tell 
you that the pomp and service of great 
funerals has oftentimes very few angels 
hovering in the air; I tell you there be 
many and many poor pauper funerals where 
the air is thick with the angels that are con- 
voying that happy and blessed soul to the 
kingdom of God's grace. Seek not the 
world ; seek not its honors, nor its treasures, 
nor its fallacious joys; build yourself into 
manhood on the pattern of Jesus Christ, 
and the things that you do not seek will 
come flocking to you of their own accord, 
and you shall have joy by day and by night, 
and hope that never fails ; and oh, when the 
earth recedes you will have nothing to re- 
gret; you will leave nothing behind you 
32 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 



that is worth taking ; you will take the soul 
that is refashioned in the image of Jesus 
Christ ; and as you draw nearer to the end 
you will draw nearer to the beginning ; and 
who can tell the first outburst of rapture 
and joy as one springing from the prison of 
this clay body beholds Him "as He is?" 
''As He is !" And here is His voice, 
sweeter than all music, saying with smiles, 
''Come ; welcome." Let us all accept, then, 
Christ for our schoolmaster, and let Him 
educate us into Christian life, and then live 
to honor Him and die to enjoy Him for- 
ever. 

NEEDLESS CARE AND AXXIETi\ 

The roads w^hich lead to anxiety may 
properly attract our attention for a few mo- 
ments. In the first place there is that kind 
of living which exhausts the vitality of the 
body. ]\Ien spend their capital, and they 
break down with liver complaint ; they 
spend their capital, and break down with 
dyspepsia ; they spend their capital, and 
vices have drained them dry long before 
they should have been blighted. Anything 
that takes out of the nervous system its 
vital tone lowers a man's conscious enjoy- 
ment; and if, therefore, men are melan- 
choly, sad-minded, and see nothing hopeful 
or healthful when they are sick, they ought 
to be treated like sick men. But a man 
33 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



would never want to see the benefits of 
health by going into a hospital and seeing 
the woes of sickness ; and in life we are not 
to go to men that are desponding, and dull- 
eyed, and complaining, never having any 
luck. There are thousands of men that 
never did have luck but once in their lives, 
and that was when they died. Such men 
oftentimes throw a gloom over the whole 
landscape, and over the whole experience. 
This is all bad, all bad ! 

But, aside from this, the melancholy that 
comes from exhausted nervous forces — the 
invalid's melancholy, which is a matter for 
medication just as much as any organic 
lesion — there are great differences arising 
from national character. Nations that 
value time, that are inspired with endless 
industry, that are taxing in various ways 
every resource — the weaker among them, 
and those that fail- naturally fall into a kind 
of gulf of despondency ; they are more 
likely to be attacked with it than any other. 
I am speaking about your nation, I am 
speaking about my own — I am speaking of 
the Anglo-Saxon race. are a driving, 

accomplishing, enterprising, industrious 
people, and we are very apt to waste our 
forces without moderation, and to deter- 
mine our enjoyment by the amount of am- 
bitions which have been fulfilled in our 
strife with nature and with society. I do 
84 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 



not think that in the Oriental lands, where 
men do not try to excel and do not excel, 
there is half so much misenjoyment as there 
is in the nations that have aspiration and 
ambition. It is a national temptation. 

Then, besides that, modern civilization is 
so complex, and so exciting, and so nerve- 
consuming, that that tends to mislead men 
and draw them away from the true spirit 
of religion. I would not on that account 
untwist tne cords that go to make the 
strong bonds of civilization. A man lives 
in our time in a civilized community, and in 
the full enjoyment of all the things which 
knowledge and refinement and religion 
bring. A man lives more in one year than 
a savage life affords in eighty years. W e 
live more in one hour than the majority of 
the globe live in twenty-four. And thus, 
as there is so much excitement, and such a 
play of the mind perpetually, and so many 
things in civilization that are neither wise 
nor wholesome, by the very mercies of civ- 
ilization we are in danger of bringing our- 
selves into the shallow waters, and coming 
into that state in which we are anxious and 
full of cares as to what will happen to-mor- 
row and what will happen next week. In 
business it is largely so. It is largely so in 
that part of business in which men commit 
themselves to trust, to credit. The man 
that pays as he goes, and tliat at every day 
35 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

at sundown knows just how he stands, 
must be a very sad-minded man if he does 
not find it easier to be trustful and calm 
than the man that is trusting everything to 
contingencies in the future. So, then, our 
very style of civilization tends to lead us 
into false conditions of mind. 

Then there is this greed of w^ealth, I 
think, perhaps, almost more than anything 
else, and it is that that Christ struck be- 
tween the very two eyes when He said to 
his disciples : "Take no thought for the 
morrow ; the morrow shall take thought for 
itself ; the Gentiles seek what they shall eac 
and what they shall drink, and wherewithal 
they shall be clothed ; be ye not like them ; 
trust your heavenly Father, w^ho knows that 
you have need of all these things." You 
can push that to an extreme in which it 
would be false ; but as an overruling idea of 
living within the scope of an easy hopeful- 
ness there can be no question what Christ 
meant in that matter. When men have 
enough for to-day and measurably for 
months — raiment enough, food enough, 
shelter enough, prospect enough — they are 
not likely to be tempted with carefulness 
of this sordid kind ; but where a man wants 
not only enough for himself, and his wife, 
and children, and household, but more than 
he has any need of, when a man wants 
enough and a surplus, and then wants 
36 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 



enough and a double surplus, and then 
enough and a quadruple surplus, he begins 
to have the ambition of wealth ; he wants 
more than that man has got who used to 
hold his head so high, and he says, ''I will 
show him some day" ; he wants more than 
his father had, more than that old banker 
or capitalist had. He has just found out 
the way to get rich ; it is not because his 
children need it, it is not because he needs 
it, but because he thinks he can get it, and 
then he will have the credit of it and the 
power of it, and can parade himself among 
admiring crowds, who will whisper: ''See 
there the richest man in town/' And so it 
comes to pass that that which, in a mod- 
erate degree, is a virtue and a benefit to the 
individual and to society, multiplying the 
means of civilization which we can yield for 
ourselves and for others, leads us to become 
the slaves of avarice and greedir^ess ; and 
where this comes to pass see what strife, 
what collision, what rivalry, w4iat envy, 
what morbid solicitudes ! So men are dis- 
turbed by their enterprise. 

Then society itself is a great bundle of 
legislation. After all the laws of nature 
have been laid down, and the laws of civil 
society have been introduced, then the great 
mass of mankind introduce another and 
more subtle set of laws of etiquette and pro- 
cedure, never written and not writeable, but 
37 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



nevertheless learned, and by and by the 
question comes to me : "Wliat will people 
think of us ? What must we do at table ? 
What must we do in the carriage? AMiat 
must we do in the sidewalk ? How must 
we dress ? What is the public sentiment, 
and how can we defer to it ? All these ten 
thousand nebulous questions harass some 
foolish people's lives, and render them full 
of care and perpetual anxiety. Simplicity 
dies in the presence of fashion. 

But besides these there are the tendencies 
which are bred by poverty that is never so 
poor as in the presence of wealth ; and 
never so poor as in the case of men that 
have had wealth and have broken down and 
sunk little by little to the bottom of society, 
and lost self-respect and reputation and 
everything, and that look even upon their 
family and their children without any re- 
muneration of joy. "Once," they say, "I 
could have brought up my children like 
anybody else — now I cannot : I can do 
nothing for them ; my life is ended ; I have 
got no property, no reputation." Good 
heavens! Haven't you got a God left? 
Haven't you immortality left ? Have you 
not all the realm of peace which God min- 
isters to the soul of a man? Get up out of 
the dungeon of your passions ; get up where 
the sunshine comes ! A man has stumbled 
on the road of hfe, and has lost his house. 
38 



Needless Care and Anxiety. 



Well, it is hard to see the piano go out and 
be sold by auction ; it is hard to pull off the 
diamond rings and sell them to raise a little 
money; it is harder yet to see a person 
whose spirit is cowed because he has to get 
rid of the superfluities of life ; it is harder 
yet to see a man that has so little concep- 
tion of what he is in God. I am a son of 
God. Roll my garments in the dust — what 
then? Roll my crown from the head — no- 
body can take away my crown; it *'remain- 
eth;'' there is a peace of God that remain- 
eth. There is no rivalry for your faith, 
none for your hope, none for your joy, the 
endless treasury of a son of God, who, be- 
cause he is an heir of God and joint heir 
with Jesus Christ, owns the universe. The 
idea of man knuckling down to disappoint- 
ments and troubles that has all this left to 
him shows that the man is broken not only 
outside, but inside, shattered to atonis. 
Your life is not here, it is hid with Christ 
in God : and every man ought to feel in 
himself: 'T am that that no man can 
smirch ; no matter what reprobate lips may 
say, it cannot touch me." The eagle sits 
upon the topmost crag, and the fowler far 
below draws vain arrows at him. There is 
not power in the bow to send the shaft so 
liigh as where he sits securely. And he 
who has made God his trust need fear 
neither bullet nor arrow, for no man can 
39 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



reach to touch him with harm there. In 
that hope ought we to live ; we are the sons 
of God. 

HEROISM IX SUFFERING. 

There is in warfare a heroism that 
hardly appears in moral life, not certainly 
often enough, ^^llen Badajoz was to be 
stormed, in the Peninsular \\'ar, under the 
Duke of Wellington, it was considered an 
unjust thing to select himself the regiments 
that were to be the forlorn hope, and, at the 
peril of almost certain death, storm the 
breach. He then called for volunteers, so 
that there might be no partiality. In many 
instances the whole body of soldiery rushed 
forward to volunteer, and he was ol3liged to 
put them back. There is in war the feeling 
that the most desperate enterprises are 
those that the heroic want to achieve : they 
want the chance of danger and peril. And 
so it is in the kingdom of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. Men are often chosen, if they 
would but know it, because they are sup- 
posed to be competent to heroism under 
those conditions. Xot every man is a poor 
man; but there be many who. when they 
have been robbed by the hand of fortune, 
and especially by the injustice of that that 
gave them distinctions before, are cast 
down, and as they lose their property and 
go out of the big house into the little hotise, 
40 



Heroism in Suffering. 

they say: "It is no use, my dear, our pros- 
perity is over ; I never can make another 
fortune; all our friends will fall off from 
us, and as we go through the streets people 
will say : ''There is the man that used to be 
rich." Good heavens ! you ought to be a 
thousand times richer than you were then — 
then you had outward riches, then you were 
in mere bodily conditions ; now stand up, if 
there is any manhood in you, if there is any 
holy or consecrated pride, for manhood is 
better than moneyhood. Ah ! you that 
have lost your money, and lost your cour- 
age, and lost your hope, and lost your faith, 
get out of the way ! But if you have lost 
that w^hich gave you exterior position 
among men, and you can still stand up, and 
men can say, ''He is grander than he ever 
was — no tears, no whining, no complaints, 
no conscious weakness — I never saw a man 
that seemed so manly !" — oh, blessed man ! 
do you know^ that the treasure of the soul 
outmeasures all other treasures whatsoever ; 
and Christ says to you: 'T want you to 
abound; I will make you rich," and then 
you walk in more humility, gentleness, 
meekness, sympathy, and benevolence, 
never showing yourself so much a Christian 
as w^hen dealing with those round about 
you that need you, not with men that 
can bring praise to you, but the men 
that can bring nothing but the oppor- 
41 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



tunity for you to do self-denying work. 
It is a great thing to be able to stand 
and represent Christ in prosperity, but 
when Christ says : ''Shift the scene,'' tod 
the curtain rolls up, and you stand in the 
midst of your wreck and ruin, and when 
Christ says : "Now, be heroic, show what 
grace has done for you; show that you are 
a child of God in disguise ; make illustrious 
your faith, your patience, your kindness, 
gentleness, sweetness, long-suffering, up- 
looking trust'' — oh ! blessed be the man that 
has thus the chance of representing Christ 
twice, at the top of prosperity and at the 
bottom of afliiction. He will not forget 
you. Milton says : 

He also serves who only stands and waits. 

It is a great thing for a man to stand and 
be active and so get credit ; but it is a great 
thing, also, for one to be bedridden, to lie 
through weary days and nights uncom- 
plaining, though pain be like a sword in the 
bones, to see the days waste and weakness 
holding you down. You say : "Why is 
this? why is this?" "Dear child," saith the 
Lord to such, "I have need of some one to 
exhibit patience and sweetness and good- 
ness on a sick bed, and I chose you because 
I thought you could show it; but, my child, 
if you are not willing for this office, let me 
raise you up, and some other hero shall be 
42 



Heroism in Suffering. 



called." ]\Iethinks the heroic heart would 
say: "Xo, no: let me lie, if only I may 
glorify Thee by being sweetly contented in 
m.y disease, in my sorrow, and in my trou- 
ble.'' You know that there never would be 
a rainbow if there was not a storm. There 
are many people that have storms, but there 
are very few people who know how to put 
rainbows on them. 

How far below these ideals, and this 
standard of living, is the average Christian 
experience of so-called Christian men and 
Christian women I There are a great 
many people, I think, that will be saved : 
they have got something in them, and they 
will be ''saved, so as by fire." A\^ell, I 
would not reject the glowworm. Though 
the glowworm does not compare with a 
candle, or with a star, or with the sun, yet it 
has something after all of life in it. So 
there are Christians that are mere glow- 
worms, emitting a furtive flash every now 
and then ; but how many are there of whom 
it may be said that the rising light grows 
more and more m them unto the perfect 
day, they are triumphing over temptation, 
over selfishness and indolence and all self- 
seeking, and they are living so that no one 
can look upon them without saying: "This 
is a case of another sort ; there must be the 
Divine power here, or no man could live as 
this man or this woman lives?'' I think 
43 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



there are probably a good many saints that 
go out of our churches ; but I think there 
are a great many more going out of our 
hospitals, and not a few out of our poor- 
houses, and a great many out of the lower 
walks of life. If the angels of God were 
to come and gather up those that in distress 
and poverty and suffering have maintained 
a holy faith and a godly life and example, 
they would garner from the bottom of so- 
ciety, and last, and with the smallest 
sheaves, from the top of society. ''For the 
last shall be first and the first last/'" 

REPEXTAXCE. 

The life of a Christian is a life of one 
who, conscious of evil, determines hence- 
forth to live a higher and a nobler life. The 
Christian repentance is the repentance of 
those things that are forbidden by Christ, 
and it is a growing up unto Him in all 
things which He commands and exempli- 
fies. And in that work let no man suppose 
that he can repent once for all. 

Repentance in its very nature is distribu- 
tive. In our very nature we are like chil- 
dren at school who learn their lessons ; they 
are more or less dull, and every time they 
go aside from their purpose of education 
they are sorry for it, and they have reappli- 
cation and intensity at the next hour. We 
44 



Repentance. 



are all imperfect. We come short of the 
glory of God ; we come short of our own 
purposes ; we look back upon our lives, and 
see to-day that we purposed to go all day 
long in the bright sunshine of hope and 
love, but before night comes there are 
storms in our sky, there is fretfulness in 
our sky, there is injustice; and when the 
sun sinks down we say : "I would have 
done good, but evil was present with me." 
''The good that I would I do not, and the 
evil that I would not that I do" is the ex- 
perience of every man. What then? If a 
man is traveling and slips and falls, does 
he sit still? or does he say: 'T am not a 
traveler"? or does he say: "I will get up 
and go back" ? No ; he gets up and goes 
forward. And at every step of the Chris- 
tian life our infelicities, our want of right 
dispositions, our indolence confront us. 
For life is very large and multifarious, and 
the events are multitudinous, and there is no 
person that every day will not have occasion 
to say : 'T have not done that which I meant 
to do ; I have not reached the standard I 
set before me." What says Paul? ''This 
one thing I do, forgetting the things behind, 
I reach forward to the future ; I have put 
behind my memory, my failings, and my 
sins ; I do not count them any more — they 
are all gone and done with. This is my 
life, to hold the idea of duty and rectitude 
45 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



and tenderness and love and activity, and 
every single day, instead of looking back to 
see how much I have come short of it, I look 
forward and take a new look at the stand- 
ard of duty — I go toward it, I work toward 
it." In that course you save yourself a vast 
amount of mischance, of mistake, of worry, 
and useless trouble, and you have the sym- 
pathy of God. "Like as a father pitieth his 
children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear 
Him. For he knoweth our frame. He re- 
membereth that we are dust." We are 
weaker in His sight than we are in our own ; 
we come short in His sight more than we 
do in our ow^n; nevertheless. He takes us 
with the compassion and the capacity of a 
father who takes a little child in his arms 
and carries it. Let us not, therefore, fall 
into these stupid furrows, these ways of re- 
pentance which are external, which are very 
often merely aggravations rather than ben- 
efits to us because we have done wrong. 
Live to-day by your standard, and so far as 
you come short, say : "I am sorry, but. 
Lord, I come to Thee." And take a new 
start, and so day by day live by faith of 
Him that loved you, and gave Himself for 
you, and who ever lives to intercede for you 
and to succor you. 



46 



THE DIVINE ABUNDANCE. 

There is a false view of God taught in the- 
ology. It is taught that men must repent 
before God will care for them. It is be- 
cause God cares for them that they can re- 
pent. He cares for them before they re- 
pent, or they never would. Do you suppose 
that it is the growing up of the asparagus, 
the grass, and the spring flowers that brings 
the spring? or is it the spring that brings 
them ? Do you suppose that our determina- 
tions and purposes and wills and all that 
can bring God to us? It is His drawing 
that brings us to them. And yet how 
strong is the feeling ! Ah ! my soul, thou 
know^est it well — I lie down dead as a thorn. 
Was a man ever taught by a nobler father 
than I? And yet what weary days I have 
known, and what an utter degradation of 
spirit and soul does it seem as I look back 
upon it now, when I thronged the doors of 
the house of prayer, asking men to pray 
for me — as if Dr. Humphrey or anybody 
else was nearer to my soul than Jesus was ! 
And what utter repetitions ! ''Lord, con- 
vert me ! Lord, convert me ! Give me 
evidence! Give me evidence!'' I held 
my soul as a man might hold a watch, 
and stop it to see whether it had been 
going or not. The evidence of a man 
47 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



is his life. Start in it at once and you 
have the help of all heaven. Begin — move. 
Ah ! when a man has been nearly drowned 
and rescued from the water, and brought 
home, the wife, in distraction, fills the house 
with shrieks, "He is dead! He is dead!'' 
And there is every sign of death on him. 
By and by the physician, applying his rem- 
edies, feels, and he thinks there is a faint, 
deep breath ; he holds the glass to his 
mouth, and it is bedewed, and the word 
goes out, ''He is aUve ! He is alive!" And 
the whole house roars as it were with hope 
and joy. The man is not walking about ; 
he need not get up or sit down at table ; he 
cannot do anything; but the slightest touch 
of evidence that he is b'eginning to live has 
in it the whole promise of the future. 

Now, if a man wants God he wants the 
higher life in God ; it is not for him to wait 
till he can robe himself in saintly garments 
and say : "Lord, I have complied with Thy 
conditions, accept me.'' Xo man is ever 
going to be accepted of God except as a 
babe is accepted by its mother ; and of all 
things that ever lived on this earth there is 
nothing so near zero as a new-born babe. 
But there is a provision in the mother of a 
love overpowering, more than the child 
needs by day, more than it needs by night ; 
a myriad preparation for all that the child 
shall need is waiting — waiting on his devel- 
48 



The Divine Abundance. 



opment, waiting on his first dawn of 
thought and intelligence, waiting on his 
crooked dispositions, waiting on him all the 
way, and the mother is the living sacrifice 
for the child to guide him to manhood, to 
virtue, and to truth. And shall a mother be 
all this to her child, and we not understand 
what God is to every struggling human 
soul — the life of our life, the inspiration of 
our dullness, the light of our darkness and 
our hope and joy? This is what faith 
means — taking these declarations in respect 
to God as if they were true. A man stands 
in a garden and says: "\Miat is this tree?" 
'"A pear tree,'' he is told, and he believes it. 
'And what is this tree?" 'Tt is a rose 
tree," and he believes it. Yet when God 
has made known to us the infinite depth and 
riches of His grace we analyze it, and we 
ask : "How can it be, consistently with this 
and consistently with that?" Take it, be- 
lieve it ; trust it, live it ; that will settle it. 

But, coming to the question of punish- 
ment and reward and justice, do you sepa- 
rate justice from love? "\\^hom the Lord 
loveth He chasteneth." Chastening comes 
from justice, but it is love that inspires the 
chastening and inspires the justice. There 
is no separation in the Divine mind between 
the element of loving and any other ; it is 
the one grand element that includes in itself 
everything else. The wrath of God is love, 
49 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



the penalties of God are love ; they are 
schoolmasters, they are mothers, they are 
leaders. Do not stop outside and say : ''The 
justice of God may meet me in the way." 
As a figure of speech Bunyan has made it 
very vivid indeed ; nevertheless, the unity of 
the Divine nature is seen in the Divine com- 
passion and Divine love. W ell, why do not 
all men get it if that be so? Why do not 
all men get sunshine when they are blind? 
It is there, only they have no organ to re- 
ceive it. ''To as many as received Him, to 
them gave He power to become the sons of 
God.'' Open your heart, open your soul to 
this faith and the benignity and bounty of 
God the infinite tenderness of the Divine 
love — let it Vv^arm you, and you will begin 
to have perception of it, 

A man may put himself in a bomb-proof 
house, with a slate roof, and stone walls, 
and closed shutters, and say : ''Do not tell 
me summer is coming; I do not believe it." 
Summer never comes to dungeons, whether 
they be human hearts or old castles. Be 
sure of one thing, that you will never go 
wrong by trusting God — not trusting Him 
as if He did not care what became of you, 
but trusting Him. as if He did care what be- 
came of you, trusting Him as one who is 
more solicitous for your upbuilding and es- 
tablishment in purity and truth and in all 
qualities of excellence — more anxious for 
50 



The Divine Abundance. 



that than you are a thousand times. Do 
you suppose that my child cares as much for 
his education as I care for him ? I know- 
he does not. Do you suppose that he cares 
as much for his honor and his well-doing in 
life? He has no such large conception of 
life, he has no such sense of experience as I 
have for him. I feel more for my children 
than they Vlo for themselves. You do feel 
for yourself, and God feels more for us 
than we do for ourselves, in that He knows 
more of what the destiny of life is, what the 
greatness and grandeur of life eternal is, 
and what the awfulness of losing life, after 
spending it here, in the eternal dark, is. 

So, then, with this conception of the glory 
of God, it seems to me I am justified in ask- 
ing every person to accept God as He is 
known to us in Jesus Christ for every pur- 
pose of life. I beg all you who have walked 
along in a formal righteousness, and are 
Christian moralists, to look up to the light. 
You have the twilight as we have the twi- 
light through these windows, but not the 
clear shining of the sun. There is many a 
man walking in Christian life that does not 
walk under the full blaze of the light of God 
in Christ Jesus ; there is many a man that 
goes through the process of conviction, and 
then the experience of conversion, and then 
he undertakes to live in a certain degree 
conformably to his vows and promises. But 
51 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



that\is a very different thing from having 
the day by day voluntary and involuntarv 
sense of God with us, loving us, strengthen- 
ing us, helping us. 

And I ask all those that have never named 
the name of Christ : Is not a God of this uni- 
versal bounty and helpfulness a God that 
you can trust? Do you dare to set at 
naught the riches of His grace, and, in the 
face of infinite patience, goodness, gentle- 
ness, go on to sin and harden your heart ? 
Can you do it, and then call yourself an hon- 
orable man? If one plunged into the 
stream to save you and brought you out, 
and he only received buffeting at your 
hands, what kind of a man would you be? 
If one had supported you during sickness, 
and supplied you with all you needed, or 
shielded you under false accusations, and 
you turned traitor and sought his downfall, 
what kind of man would you be? Ought 
you not rather to herd with beasts than call 
yourself a man ? And shall you take day 
by day the infinite goodness of God, His 
provision, His mercies, even physical and 
temporal, much more the overhanging at- 
mosphere of Divine mercy and goodness, 
and not worship Him with all that have 
been redeemed; and join, while you live, in 
the cry : "Glory and dominion be to Him 
that loved us, and gave Himself for us, and 
washed us in His own blood?" 

52 



Lectures. 



LECTURES. 



INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS. 

From ''Lectures to Young Men/' 
"Give us this day our daily bread." — Matt, vi., 

11. 

''This we commanded you, that if any would not 
work, neither should he eat. For we hear that 
there are some which walk among you disorderly, 
working not at all, but are busybodies. Now 
them that are such we command and exhort by 
our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they 
work, and eat their own bread." — 2 Thess. iii., 10. 
cxii., 2, 3. 

The bread which we solicit of God, he 
gives us through our own industry. Prayer 
sows it, and industry reaps it. 

As industry is habitual activity in some 
useful pursuit, so not only inactivity, but 
also all efiforts without the design of useful- 
ness, are of the nature of idleness. The 
supine sluggard is no more indolent than 
the bustling do-nothing. i\Ien may walk 
much, and read much, and talk much, and 
pass the day without an unoccupied mo- 
ment, and yet be substantially idle ; because 
industry requires, at least, the intention of 
usefulness. But gadding, gazing, loun- 
ging, mere pleasure-mongering, reading for 
the relief of ennui — these are as useless as 
55 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



sleeping, or dozing, or the stupidity of a 
surfeit. 

There are many grades of idleness, and 
veins of it run through the most industrious 
life. We shall indulge in some descriptions 
of the various classes of idlers, and leave the 
reader to judge, if he be an indolent man, 
to which class he belongs. 

I. The lazy man. He is of a very 
ancient pedigree, for his family is minutely 
described by Solomon : ''How long wilt thou 
sleep, O sluggard ? when wilt thou arise out 
of thy sleep ?" This is the language of im- 
patience ; the speaker has been trying to 
awaken him — pulling, pushing, rolling him 
over, and shouting in his ear ; but all to no 
purpose. He soliloquizes whether it is pos- 
sible for the man ever to wake up ! At 
length the sleeper drawls out a dozing peti- 
tion to be let alone : ''Yet a little sleep, a lit- 
tle slumber, a little folding of the hands to 
sleep and the last words confusedly break 
into a snore — that somnolent lullaby of re- 
pose. Long ago the birds have finished 
their matins, the sun has advanced full high, 
the dew has gone from the grass, and the 
labors of industry are far in progress, when 
our sluggard, awakened by his very efforts 
to maintain sleep, slowly emerges to perform 
life's great duty of feeding, with him sec- 
ond only in importance to sleep. And now, 
well rested and suitably nourished, surely 
56 



Industry and Idleness. 



he will abound in labor. Nay, the slug- 
gard will not plough by reason of the cold. 
It is yet early spring ; there is ice in the 
north, and the winds are hearty; his tender 
skin shrinks from exposure, and he waits 
for milder days, envying the residents of 
tropical climates, where cold never comes 
and harvests wave spontaneously. He is 
valiant at sleeping and at the trencher ; but 
for other courage, the slothful man saith : 
''There is a lion without ; I shall be slain in 
the street." He has not been out to see ; 
but he heard a noise, and resolutely betakes 
himself to prudence. Under so thriving a 
manager, so alert in the morning, so busy 
through the day, and so enterprising, we 
might anticipate the thrift of his husbandry. 
I went by the field of the slothful, and by 
the vineyard of the man void of under- 
standing ; and lo ! it was all grown over 
with thorns, and nettles had covered the 
face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was 
broken down. To complete the picture 
only one thing more is w^anted — a descrip- 
tion of his house — and then we should have, 
at one view, the lazy man, his farm and 
house. Solomon has given us that also : 
*'By much slothfulness the building decay- 
eth ; and through idleness of the hands the 
house droppeth through." Let all this be 
put together, and possibly some reader may 
57 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



find an unpleasant resemblance to his own 
affairs. 

He sleeps long and late, he wakes to stu- 
pidity, with indolent eyes sleepily rolling 
over neglected work, neglected because it is 
too cold in spring, and too hot in summer, 
and too laborious at all times — a great cow- 
ard in danger, and therefore very blustering 
in safety. His lands run to waste, his 
fences are dilapidated, his crops chiefly of 
weeds and brambles ; a shattered house, the 
side leaning over as if wishing, like its 
owner, to lie down to sleep ; the chimney 
tumbling down, the roof breaking in, with 
moss and grass sprouting in its crevices ; the 
well without pump or windlass, a trap for 
their children. This is the very castle of 
indolence. 

2. Another idler as useless, but vastly 
more active than the last, attends closely to 
every one's business except his own. His 
wife earns the children's bread and his, pro- 
cures her own raiment and his ; she procures 
the wood, she procures the water, while he, 
' with hands in his pocket, is busy watching 
the building of a neighbor's barn, or advis- 
ing another how to trim and train his vines ; 
or he has heard of sickness in a friend's 
family, and is there to suggest a hundred 
cures and to do everything but to help ; he 
is a spectator of shooting matches, a stickler 
for a ring and fair play at every fight. He 
58 



Industry and Idleness. 



knows all the stories of all the families that 
live in the town. If he can catch a stranger 
at the tavern in a rainy day, he pours out a 
strain of information, a pattering of words 
as thick as the raindrops out of doors. He 
has good advice to everybody, how to save, 
how to make money, how to do everything ; 
he can tell the saddler about his trade ; he 
gives advice to the smith about his work, 
and goes over with him when it is forged 
to see the carriagemaker put it on ; suggests 
improvem.ents, advises this paint or that 
varnish, criticises the finish, or praises the 
trimmings. He is a violent reader of news- 
papers, almanacs, and receipt books ; and 
with scraps of history and mutilated anec- 
dotes he faces the very schoolmaster, and 
gives up only to the volubility of the oily vil- 
lage lawyer; few have the hardihood to 
match him. 

And thus every day he bustles through 
his multifarious idleness, and completes his 
circle of. visits as regularly as the pointers 
of a clock visit each figure on the dial plate ; 
but alas ! the clock forever tells man the 
useful lesson of time passing steadily away 
and returning never; but what useful thing 
do these busy, buzzing idlers perform ? 

3. We introduce another idler. He fol- 
lows no vocation ; he only follows those who 
do. Sometimes he sweeps along the streets 
with consequential gait, sometimes perfumes 
59 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



it with wasted odors of tobacco. He also 
haunts sunny benches or breezy piazzas. 
His business is to see ; his desire to be seen, 
and no one fails to see him — so gaudily 
dressed, his hat sitting aslant upon a wilder- 
ness of hair, like a bird half startled from 
its nest, and every thread arranged to pro- 
voke attention. He is a man of honor — not 
that he keeps his word or shrinks from 
meanness. He defrauds his laundress, his 
tailor, and his landlord. He drinks and 
smokes at other men's expense. He gam- 
bles and swears, and fights — when he is too 
drunk to be afraid ; but still he is a man of 
honor, for he has whiskers and looks fierce, 
wears mustachios, and says : ''Upon my 
honor, sir; do you doubt my honor, sir?" 

Thus he appears by day; by night he 
does not appear ; he may be dimly seen flit- 
ting; his voice may be heard loud in the 
carousal of some refection cellar, or above 
the songs and uproar of a midnight return 
and home-staggering. 

4. The next of this brotherhood excites 
our pity. He began life most thriftily; for 
his rising family he was gathering an ample 
subsistence; but, involved in other men's 
affairs, he went down in their ruin. Late 
in life he begins once more, and at length, 
just secure of an easy competence, his ruin 
is compassed again. He sits dow^n quietly 
under it, complains of no one, envies no one, 
60 



Industry and Idleness. 



refuseth the cup, and is even more pure in 
morals than in better days. He moves on 
from day to day, as one who walks under a 
spell ; it is the spell of despondency which 
nothing can disenchant or arouse. He 
neither seeks work nor refuses it. He wan- 
ders among men a dreaming gazer, poorly 
clad, always kind, always irresolute, able to 
plan nothing for himself nor to execute 
what others have planned for him. He 
lives and he dies, a discouraged man, and 
the most harmless and excusable of all 
idlers. 

5. I have not mentioned the fashionable 
idler, whose riches defeat every object for 
which God gave him birth. He has a fine 
form and manly beauty, and the chief end 
of life is to display them. With notable 
diligence he ransacks the market for rare 
and curious fabrics, for costly seals and 
chains and rings. A coat poorly fitted is 
the unpardonable sin of his creed. He 
meditates upon cravats, employs a profound 
discrimination in selecting a hat or a vest, 
and adopts his conclusions upon the taste- 
fulness of a button or a collar with the de- 
liberation of a statesman. Thus capar- 
isoned, he saunters in fashionable galleries, 
or flaunts in stylish equipage, or parades 
the streets with simpering belles, or delights 
their itching ears with compHments of "flat- 
tery or with choicely culled scandal. He is 
61 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



a reader of fictions, if they be not too sub- 
stantial, a writer of cards and billet-doux, 
and is especially conspicuous in albums. 
Gay and frivolous, rich and useless, polished 
till the enamel is worn off, his whole life 
serves only to make him an animated pup- 
pet of pleasure. He is as corrupt in im- 
agination as he is refined in manners ; he is 
as selfish in private as he is generous in 
public ; and even what he gives to another 
is given for his own sake. He worships 
where fashion worships ; to-day at the the- 
atre, to-morrow at the church, as either ex- 
hibits the whitest hand or the most polished 
actor. A gaudy, active, and indolent but- 
terfly, he flutters without industry from 
flower to flower, until summer closes and 
frosts sting him, and he sinks down and 
dies, unthought of and unremembered. 

6. One other portrait should be drawn of 
a business man, who wishes to subsist by his 
occupation, while he attends to everything 
else. If a sporting club goes to the woods, 
he must go. He has set his line in every 
hole in the river, and dozed in a summer 
day under every tree along its bank. He 
rejoices in a riding party, a sleigh ride, a 
summer frolic, a winter's glee. He is 
everybody's friend, universally good- 
natured, forever busy where it will do him 
no good, and remiss where his interests re- 
quire activity. He takes amusement for his 
62 



Industry and Idleness. 



main business, which other men employ as 
a relaxation ; and the serious labor of life,, 
which other men are mainly employed in, 
he knows only as a relaxation. After a few 
years he fails, his good-nature is something 
clouded ; and as age sobers his buoyancy 
without repairing his profitless habits, he 
soon sinks to a lower grade of laziness and 
to ruin. 

It would be endless to describe the wiles 
of idleness — how it creeps upon men. how 
secretly it mingles with their pursuits, how 
much time it purloins from the scholar, 
from the professional man. and from the 
artisan. It steals minutes, it clips oft the 
edges of hours, and at length takes posses- 
sion of days. AMiere it has its will it sinks 
and drowns employment : but where neces- 
sity or ambition or duty resists such vio- 
lence,, then indolence makes labor heavy, 
scatters the attention, puts us to our tasks 
with wandering thoughts, with irresolute 
purpose, and with dreamy visions. Thus 
when it may, it plucks out hours and rules 
over them ; and where this may not be, it 
lurks around them to impede the sway of 
industry, and turn her seeming toils to sub- 
tle idleness. Against so mischievous an en- 
chantress we should be duly armed. I 
shall, therefore, describe the advantages of 
industry and the evils of indolence. 

I. A hearty industry promotes happi- . 
63 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

ness. Some men of the greatest industry 
are unhappy from infehcity of disposition ; 
they are morose, or suspicious, or envious. 
Such quahties make happiness impossible 
under any circumstances. 

Heahh is the platform on which all happi- 
ness must be built. Good appetite, good di- 
gestion, and good sleep are the elements of 
health, and industry confers them. As use 
polishes metals, so labor the faculties, until 
the body performs its unimpeded functions 
with elastic cheerfulness and hearty enjoy- 
ment. 

Buoyant spirits are an element of happi- 
ness, and activity produces them; but the}' 
fly away from sluggishness, as fixed air 
from open wine. ]\Ien's spirits are like 
water, which sparkles when it runs, but 
stagnates in still pools, and is mantled with 
green, and breeds corruption and filth. The 
applause of conscience, the self-respect of 
pride, the consciousness of independence, a 
manly joy of usefulness, the consent of 
every faculty of the mind to one's occupa- 
tion, and their gratification in it — these con- 
stitute a happiness superior to the fever- 
flashes of vice in its brightest moments. 
After an experience of ages, which has 
taught nothing different from this, men 
should have learned that satisfaction is not 
the product of excess, or of indolence, or of 
riches, but of industry, temperance, and 
64 ' 



Industry and Idleness. 



usefulness. Every village has instances 
which ought to teach young men that he 
who goes aside from the simpHcity of nature 
and the purity of virtue, to wallow^ in ex- 
cesses, carousals, and surfeits, at length 
misses the errand of his life, and, sinking 
with shattered body prematurely to a dis- 
honored grave, mourns that he mistook ex- 
liilaration for satisfaction, and abandoned 
the very home of happiness when he for- 
sook the labors of useful industry. 

The poor man with industry is happier 
than the rich man in idleness ; for labor 
makes the one more manly, and riches un- 
mans the other. The slave is often happier 
than the master, who is nearer undone by 
license than his vassal by toil. Luxurious 
couches, plushy carpets from Oriental 
looms, pillows of eiderdown, carriages con- 
trived with cushions and springs to make 
motion imperceptible — is the indolent mas- 
ter of these as happy as the slave that wove 
the carpet, the Indian who hunted the north- 
ern flock, or the servant who drives the 
pampered steeds? Let those who envy the 
gay revels of city idlers, and pine for their 
masquerades, their routs, and their operas, 
experience for a week the lassitude of their 
satiety, the unarousable torpor of their life 
when not under a fiery stimulus, their des- 
perate ennui and restless somnolency, and 
65 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

they would gladly flee from their haunts as 
from a land of cursed enchantment. 

2. Industry is the parent of thrift. In 
the overburdened states of Europe, the se- 
verest toil often only suffices to make life a 
wretched vacillation between food and fam- 
ine ; but in America, industry is prosperity. 

Although God has stored the world with 
an endless variety of riches for man's wants, 
he has made them all accessible only to in- 
dustry. The food we eat, the raiment 
which covers us, the house which protects, 
must be secured by diligence. To tempt 
man yet more to industry, every product of 
the earth has a susceptibility of improve- 
ment ; so that man not only obtains the gifts 
of nature at the price of labor, but these 
gifts become more precious as we bestow 
upon them greater skill and cultivation. 
The wheat and maize which crown our am- 
ple fields were food fit but for birds, before 
man perfected them by labor. The fruits 
of the forest and the hedge, scarcely tempt- 
ing to the extremest hunger, after skill has 
dealt with them and transplanted them to 
the orchard and the garden, allure every 
sense with the richest colors, odors, and 
flavors. The world is full of germs which 
man is set to develop, and there is scarcely 
an assignable limit to which the hand of 
skill and labor may not bear the powers of 
nature. 

66 



Industry and Idleness. 



The scheming speculations of the last ten 
years have produced an aversion among the 
young to the slow accumulations of ordi- 
nary industry, and fired them with a con- 
viction that shrewdness, cunning, and bold 
ventures are a more manly way to wealth. 
There is a swarm of men, bred in the heats 
of adventurous times, whose thoughts scorn 
pence and farthings, and who humble them- 
selves to speak of dollars ; hundreds and 
thousands are their words. They are men 
of great operations. Forty thousand dol- 
lars is a moderate profit of a single specula- 
tion. They mean to own the bank, and to 
look down before they die upon Astor and 
Girard. The young farmer becomes almost 
ashamed to meet his schoolmate, whose 
stores line whole streets, whose stocks are 
in every bank and company, and whose in- 
creasing money is already well-nigh ines- 
timable. But if the butterfly derides the 
bee in summer, he was never known to do 
it in the lowering days of autumn. 

Every few years commerce has its earth- 
quakes, and the tall and toppling ware- 
houses which haste ran up are first shaken 
dow^n. The hearts of men fail them for 
fear ; and the suddenly rich, made more sud- 
denly poor, fill the land with their loud la- 
ments. But nothing strange has happened. 
When the whole story of commercial disas- 
ters is told, it is only found out that they 
67 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



who slowly amassed the gains of useful in- 
dustry built upon a rock, and they who flung 
together the imaginary millions of commer- 
cial speculations built upon the sand. 
When times grew dark, and the winds came, 
and the floods descended and beat upon 
them both, the rock sustained the one, and 
the shifting sand let down the other. If a 
young man has no higher ambition in life 
than riches, industry — plain, rugged, brown- 
faced, homely-clad, old-fashioned industry 
— must be courted. Young men are 
pressed with a most unprofitable haste. 
They wish to reap before they have 
ploughed or sown. Everything is driving 
at such a rate that they have become giddy. 
Laborious occupations are avoided. Aloney 
is to be earned in genteel leisure, with the 
help of fine clothes, and by the soft seduc- 
tions of sm.ooth hair and luxuriant whiskers. 

Parents, equally wild, foster the delusion. 
Shall the promising lad be apprenticed to 
his uncle, the blacksmith? The sisters 
think the blacksmith so very smutty; the 
mother shrinks from the ungentility of his 
swarthy labor ; the father, weighing the 
matter prudentially deeper, finds that a 
whole life had been spent in earning the 
uncle's property. These sagacious parents, 
wishing the tree to bear its fruit before it 
has ever blossomed, regard the long delay 
of industrious trades as a fatal objection to 
68 



Industry and Idleness. 



them. The son, then, must be a rich mer- 
chant, or a popular lawyer, or a broker ; and 
these only as the openings to speculation. 

Young business men are often educated 
in two very unthrifty species of contempt — 
a contempt for small gains, and a contempt 
for hard labor. To do one's own errands, 
to wheel one's own barrow, to be seen with 
a bundle, bag, or burden, is disreputable. 
Men are so sharp nowadays that they can 
compass by their shrewd heads what their 
fathers used to do with their heads and 
hands. 

3. Industry gives character and credit to 
the young. The reputable portions of so- 
ciety have maxims of prudence by which the 
young are judged and admitted to their 
good opinion. Does he regard his word? 
Is he industrious? Is he economical? Is 
he free from immoral habits ? The answer 
which a young man's conduct gives to these 
questions settles his reception among good 
men. Experience has shown that the other 
good qualities of veracity, frugality, and 
modesty are apt to be associated with indus- 
try. A prudent man would scarcely be per- 
suaded that a listless, lounging fellow would 
be economical or trustworthy. An em- 
ployer would judge wisely that, where there 
was little regard for time or for occupation, 
there would be as little, upon temptation, for 
honesty or veracity. Pilferings of the till 
69 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



and robberies are fit deeds for idle clerks 
and lazy apprentices. Industry and knav- 
ery are sometimes found associated ; but men 
wonder at it as at a strange thing. The 
epithets of society which betoken its experi- 
ence are all in favor of industry. Thus the 
terms, ''a hard-working man," ''an indus- 
trious man," "3. laborious artisan," are em- 
ployed to mean an honest man, a trustwor- 
thy man. 

I may here, as well as anywhere, impart 
the secret of what is called good and bad 
luck. There are men who, supposing Prov- 
idence to have an implacable spite against 
them, bemoan in the poverty of a wretched 
old age the misfortunes of their lives. Luck 
forever ran against them, and for others. 
One, with a good profession, lost his luck 
in the river, where he idled away his time 
a-fishing when he should have been in the 
office. Another, with a good trade, per- 
petually burnt up his luck by his hot tem- 
per, which provoked all his customers to 
leave him. Another, with a lucrative busi- 
ness, lost his luck by amazing diligence at 
everything but his business. Another, who 
steadily followed his trade, as steadily fol- 
lowed his bottle. Another, who was hon- 
est and constant to his work, erred by per- 
petual mis judgments — he lacked discretion. 
Hundreds, lose their luck by indorsing, by 
sanguine speculations, by trusting fraudu- 
70 



Industry and Idleness. 



lent men. and by dishonest gains. A man 
never has good luck who has a bad wife. I 
never knew an early-rising, hard-working, 
prudent man, careful of his earnings and 
strictly honest, who complained of bad luck. 
A good character, good habits, and iron in- 
dustry are impregnable to the assaults of 
all the ill luck that fools ever dreamed of. 
But when I see a tatterdemalion creeping 
out of a grocery late in the forenoon, with 
his hand stuck into his pockets, the rim of 
his hat turned tip. and the crown knocked 
in, I know he has had bad luck : for the 
worst of all luck is to be a sluggard, a 
knave, or a tippler. 

4. Industry is a substitute for genius. 
Where one or more faculties exist in the 
highest state of development and activity — 
as the faculty of music in ^lozart. invention 
in Fulton, ideality in ]\Iilton — we call their 
possessor a genius. But a genius is usually 
understood to be a creature of such rare 
facility of mind, that he can do anything 
without labor. According to the popular no- 
tion, he learns without study, and knows 
without learning. He is eloquent without 
preparation, exact without calculation, and 
profound without reflection. While ordi- 
nary men toil for knowledge by reading, bv 
comparison and by minute research, a 
genius is supposed to receive it as the mind 
receives dreams. His mind is like a vast 
71 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



cathedral, through whose colored windows 
the sunlight streams, painting the aisles 
with the varied colors of brilliant pictures. 
Such minds may exist. 

So far as my observations have ascer- 
tained the species, they abound in acade- 
mies, colleges, and Thespian societies, in 
village debating clubs, in coteries of young 
artists, and among young professional as- 
pirants. They are to be known by a re- 
served air, excessive sensitiveness, and utter 
indolence ; by very long hair, and very open 
shirt collars ; by the reading of much 
wretched poetry, and the writing of much 
yet more wretched ; by being very conceited, 
very afifected, very disagreeable, and very 
useless — beings whom no man wants for 
friend, pupil, or companion. 

The occupations of the great man and of 
the common man are necessarily, for the 
most part, the same ; for the business of life 
is made up of minute affairs, requiring only 
judgment and diligence. A high order of 
intellect is required for the discovery and 
defense of truth ; but this is an unfrequent 
task. Where the ordinary wants of life 
once require recondite principles, they will 
need the application of familiar truths a 
thousand times. Those who enlarge the 
bounds of knowledge must push out with 
bold adventure beyond the common walks 
of men. But only a few pioneers are 
72 



Industry and Idleness. 



needed for the largest armies, and a few 
profound men in each occupation may her- 
ald the advance of all the business of so- 
ciety. The vast bulk of men are required 
to discharge the homely duties of life ; and 
they have less need of genius than of in- 
tellectual industry and patient enterprise. 
Young men should observe that those who 
take the honors and emoluments of mechan- 
cal crafts, of commerce, and of professional 
life are rather distinguished for a sound 
judgment and a close application, than for 
a brilliant genius. In the ordinary business 
of life, industry can do anything which 
genius can do, and very many things 
which it cannot. Genius is usually impa- 
tient of application, irritable, scornful of 
men's dullness, squeamish at petty disgusts ; 
it loves a conspicuous place, short work, and 
a large reward ; it loathes the sweat of toil, 
the vexations of life, and the dull burden of 
care. 

Industry has a firmer muscle, is less an- 
noyed by delays and repulses, and, like 
water, bends itself to the shape of the soil 
over which it flows; and, if checked, will 
not rest, but accumulates, and mines a 
passage beneath, or seeks a side-race, or 
rises above and overflows the obstruction. 
What genius performs at one impulse, in- 
dustry gains by a succession of blows. In 
ordinary matters they differ only in rapidity 
73 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



of execution, and are upon one level before 
men — who see the result but not the process. 

It is admirable to know that those things 
which, in skill, in art, and in learning, the 
world has been unwilling to let die, have 
not only been the conceptions of genius, but 
the products of toil. The masterpieces of 
antiquity, as well in literature as in art, are 
known to have received their extreme finish 
from an almost incredible continuance of 
labor upon them. I do not remember a 
book in all the departments of learning, nor 
a scrap in literature, nor a w^ork in all the 
schools of art, from which its author has 
derived a permanent renown, that is not 
known to have been long and patiently elab- 
orated. Genius needs industry, as much as 
industry needs genius. If only Milton's 
imagination could have conceived his vis- 
ions, his consummate industry only could 
have carved the immortal lines which en- 
shrine them. If only Newton's mind could 
reach out to the secrets of nature, even his 
could only do it by the homeliest toil. The 
works of Bacon are not midsummer-night 
dreams, but, like coral islands, they have 
risen from the depths of truth, and formed 
their broad surfaces above the ocean by the 
minutest accretions of persevering labor. 
The conceptions of Michael Angelo would 
have perished like a night's fantasy, had not 
his industry given them permanence. 
74 



Industry and Idleness. 



From enjoying the pleasant walks of in- 
dustry we turn reluctantly to explore the 
paths of indolence. 

All degrees of indolence incline a man to 
rely upon others and not upon himself, to 
eat their bread and not his own. His care- 
lessness is somebody's loss ; his neglect is 
somebody's downfall ; his promises are 
a perpetual stumbling block to all who 
trust them. If he borrow^s, the article 
remains borrowed ; if he begs and gets, it is 
as the letting out of waters — no one knows 
when it will stop. He spoils your work, 
disappoints your expectations, exhausts 
your patience, eats up your substance, 
abuses your confidence, and hangs a dead 
w^eight upon all your plans ; and the very 
best thing an honest man can do with a lazy 
man is to get rid of him. Solomon says : 
"Bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with 
a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart 
from him." He does not mention what 
kind of a fool he meant ; but as he speaks of 
a fool by pre-eminence, I take it for granted 
he meant a lazy man ; and I am the more in- 
clined to the opinion, from another expres- 
sion of his experience : ''As vinegar to the 
teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, so is the 
sluggard to them that send him." 

Indolence is a great spendthrift. An in- 
dolently inclined young man can neitlier 
make nor keep property. I have high 
75 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



authority for this : ''He also that is slothful 
in his work is brother to him that is a great 
waster." 

When Satan would put ordinary men to a 
crop of mischief, like a wise husbandman he 
clears the ground and prepares it for seed ; 
but he finds the idle man already prepared, 
and he has scarcely the trouble of sowing; 
for vices, like weeds, ask little strewing, ex- 
cept what the wind gives their ripe and 
winged seeds, shaking and scattering them 
all abroad. Indeed, lazy men may fitly be 
likened to a tropical prairie, over which the 
wind of temptation perpetually blows, drift- 
ing every vagrant seed from hedge and hill, 
and w^hich, without a moment's rest through 
all the year, waves its rank harvest of lux- 
uriant weeds. 

First, the imagination will be haunted 
,with unlawful visitants. Upon the out- 
skirts of tow^ns are shattered houses aban- 
doned by reputable persons. They are not 
empty, because all the day silent : Thieves, 
vagabonds, and villains haunt them, in joint 
possession with rats, bats, and vermin. 
Such are idle men's imaginations — full of 
unlawful company. 

The imagination is closely related to the 
passions, and fires them with its heat. The 
daydreams of indolent youth glow each 
hour with warmer colors and bolder adven- 
tures. The imagination fashions scenes of 
76 



Industry and Idleness. 



enchantment in which the passions revel, 
and it leads them out, in shadow at first, to 
deeds which soon they will seek in earnest. 
The brilliant colors of faraway clouds are 
but the colors of the storm ; the salacious 
daydreams of indolent men, rosy at first 
and distant, deepen every day darker 
and darker to the color of actual evil. Then 
follows the blight of every habit. Indo- 
lence promises without redeeming the 
pledge ; a mist of forgetfulness rises up 
and obscures the memory of vows and 
oaths. The negligence of laziness breeds 
more falsehoods than the cunning of the 
sharper. As poverty waits upon the steps 
of indolence, so upon such poverty brood 
equivocations, subterfuges, lying denials. 
Falsehood becomes the instrument of every 
plan. Negligence of truth, next occasional 
falsehood, then wanton mendacity — these 
three strides traverse the whole road of lies. 

Indolence as surely runs to dishonesty as 
to lying. Indeed, they are but different 
parts of the same road, and not far apart. 
In directing the conduct of the Ephesian 
converts, Paul says : ''Let him that stole 
steal no more ; but rather let him labor, 
working with his hands the thing which is 
good." The men who were thieves were 
those who had ceased to work. Industry 
was the road back to honesty. When stores 
are broken open, the idle are first suspected. 
77 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



The desperate forgeries and swindlings of 
past years have taught men, upon their oc- 
currence, to ferret their authors among the 
unemployed, or among those vainly occu- 
pied in vicious pleasures. 

The terrible passion for stealing rarely 
grows upon the young, except through the 
necessities of their idle pleasures. Busi- 
ness is first neglected for amusement, and 
amusement soon becomes the only business. 
The appetite for vicious pleasure outruns 
the means of procuring it. The theatre, 
the circus, the card table, the midnight ca- 
rouse, demand money. When scanty earn- 
ings are gone, the young man pilfers from 
the till. First, because he hopes to repay, 
and next, because he despairs of paying ; for 
the disgrace of stealing ten dollars or a 
thousand will be the same, but not their re- 
spective pleasures. Next, he will gamble, 
since it is only another form of stealing. 
Gradually excluded from reputable society, 
the vagrant takes all the badges of vice, and 
is familiar with her paths, and through 
them enters the broad road of crime. So- 
ciety precipitates its lazy members, as water 
does its fish, and they form at the bottom a 
pestilent sediment, stirred up by every 
breeze of evil into riots, robberies, and mur- 
ders. Into it drains all the filth, and out of 
it, as from a morass, flow all the streams of 
pollution. Brutal wretches, desperately 
78 



Industry and Idleness. 



haunted by the law, crawling in human filth, 
brood here their villain schemes, and plot 
mischief to man. Hither resorts the trucu- 
lent demagogue, to stir up the fetid filth 
against his adversaries, or to bring up mobs 
out of this sea which cannot rest, but casts 
up mire and dirt. 

The results of indolence upon communi- 
ties are as marked as upon individuals. In 
a town of industrious people the streets 
would be clean, houses neat and comfort- 
able, fences in repair, schoolhouses swarm- 
ing with rosy-faced children, decently clad 
and well behaved. The laws would be re- 
spected, because justly administered. The 
church would be thronged with devout wor- 
shipers. The tavern would be silent, and 
for the most part empty, or a welcome re- 
treat for weary travelers. Grogsellers 
would fail, and mechanics grow rich; labor 
would be honorable, and loafing a disgrace. 
For music, the people would have the 
blacksmith's anvil and the carpenter's ham- 
mer ; and at home, the spinning wheel and 
girls cheerfully singing at their work. Debts 
would be seldom paid, because seldom 
made; but if contracted, no grim officer 
would be invited to the settlement. Town 
officers would be respectable men, taking 
office reluctantly, and only for the public 
good. Public days would be full of sports, 
79 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



without fighting : and elections would be as 
orderly as weddings or funerals. 

In a town of lazy men I should expect to 
find crazy houses, shingles and weather- 
boards knocked off : doors hingeless and all 
a-creak ; windows stuft'ed with rags, hats, or 
pillows. Instead of flowers in summer and 
w^armth in winter, every side of the house 
would swarm with vermin in hot weather, 
and with starveling pigs in cold ; fences 
would be curiosities of lazy contrivance, and 
gates hung with ropes, or lying flat in the 
mud. Lank cattle wotfld follow every loaded 
wagon, supplicating a morsel, with famine 
in their looks. Children would be ragged, 
dirty, saucy : the schoolhouse empty ; the 
jail full; the church silent: the grogshops 
noisy : and the carpenter, the saddler, and 
the blacksmith would do their principal 
work at taverns. Lawyers would reign ; 
constables flourish, and hunt sneaking crim- 
inals; burly justices (as their interests 
might dictate) would connive a compro- 
mise or make a commitment. The peace 
officers would wink at tumults, arrest riot- 
ers in fun, and drink with them in good ear- 
nest. Good men would be obliged to keep 
dark, and bad men would swear, fight, and 
rule the town. Public days would be 
scenes of confusion, and end in rows ; elec- 
tions would be drunken, illegal, boisterous, 
and brutal. 

80 



Industry and Idleness. 



The young abhor the last results of idle- 
ness; but they do not perceive that the first 
steps lead to the last. They are in the 
opening of this career; but with them it is 
genteel leisure, not laziness ; it is relaxation, 
not sloth; amusement, not indolence. But 
leisure, relaxation, and amusement, when 
men ought to be usefully engaged, are indo- 
lence. A specious industry is the worst 
idleness. A young man perceives that the 
first steps lead to the last, with everybody 
but himself. He sees others become drunk- 
ards by social tippling ; he sips socially, as 
if he could not be a drunkard. He sees 
others become dishonest by petty habits of 
fraud, but will indulge slight aberrations, 
as if he could not become knavish. Though 
others, by lying, lose all character, he does 
not imagine that his little dalliances with 
falsehood will make him a liar. He knows 
that salacious imaginations, villainous 
pictures, harlot snuffboxes, and illicit famil- 
iarities have led thousands to her door, 
w^hose house is the w^ay to hell ; yet he never 
sighs or trembles lest these things should 
take him to this inevitable way of damna- 
tion ! 

In reading these strictures upon indo- 
lence, you will abhor it in others without 
suspecting it in yourself. While you read, 
I fear you are excusing yourself ; you are 
supposing that your leisure has not been 
81 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



laziness, or that, with your disposition and 
in your circumstances, indolence is harm- 
less. Be not deceived ; if you are idle, you 
are on the road to ruin; and there are few 
stopping places upon it. It is rather a 
precipice than a road. While I point out 
the temptation to indolence, scrutinize your 
course, and pronounce honestly upon your 
risk. 

1 . Some are tempted to indolence by their 
wretched training, or, rather, wretched want 
of it. How many families are the most re- 
miss, whose low condition and sufferings 
are the strongest inducement to industry ! 
The children have no inheritance, yet never 
work ; no education, yet are never sent to 
school. It is hard to keep their rags around 
them, yet none of them will earn better rai- 
ment. If ever there was a case when a 
government should interfere between par- 
ent and child, that seems to be the one 
where children are started in life with an 
education of vice. If, in every community, 
three things should be put together, which 
always work together, the front would be a 
grogshop, the middle a jail, the rear a gal- 
lows ; an infernal trinity, and the recruits 
for this three-headed monster are largely 
drafted from the lazy children of worthless 
parents. 

2. The children of rich parents are apt 
to be reared in indolence. The ordinary 

82 



Industry and Idleness. 



motives to industry are wanting, and the 
temptations to sloth are muhipUed. Other 
men labor to provide a support, to amass 
wealth, to secure homage, to obtain power, 
to multiply the elegant products of art. The 
child of affluence inherits these things. 
Why should he labor who may command 
universal service, whose money subsidizes 
the inventions of art, exhausts the luxuries 
of society, and makes rarities common by 
their abundance? Only the blind would 
not see that riches and ruin run in one chan- 
nel to prodigal children. The most rigor- 
ous regimen, the most confirmed industry 
and steadfast morality, can alone disarm in- 
herited wealth and reduce it to a blessing. 
The profligate wretch, who fondly watches 
his father's advancing decrepitude, and 
secretly curses the lingering steps of death 
(seldom too slow except to hungry heirs), 
at last is overblessed in the tidings that the 
loitering work is done and the estate his. 
When the golden shower has fallen, he 
rules as a prince in a court of expectant 
parasites. All the sluices by which pleas- 
urable vice drains an estate are opened 
wide. A few years complete the ruin. 
The hopeful heir, avoided by all whom he 
has helped, ignorant of useful labor, and 
scorning a knowledge of it, fired with an 
incurable appetite for vicious excitement, 
sinks steadily down — a profligate, a wretch, 
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Henry Ward Beecher. 



a villain-scoundrel, a convicted felon. Let 
parents who hate their offspring rear them 
to hate labor, and to inherit riches, and be- 
fore long they will be stung by every vice, 
racked by its poison, and damned by its 
penalty. 

3. Another cause of idleness is found in 
the secret eiTects of youthful indulgence. 
The purest pleasures lie within the circle of 
useful occupation. Mere pleasure, sought 
outside of usefulness, existing by itself, is 
fraught with poison. When its exhilara- 
tion has thoroughly kindled the mind, the 
passions thenceforth refuse a simple food ; 
they crave and require an excitement higher 
than any ordinary occupation can give. 
After reveling all night in wine dreams, or 
amid the fascinations of the dance, or the 
deceptions of the drama, what has the dull 
store or the dirty shop which can continue 
the pulse at this fever heat of delight ? The 
face of pleasure to the youthful imagination 
is the face of an angel, a paradise of smiles, 
a home of love; while the rugged face of 
industry, imbrowned by toil, is dull and re- 
pulsive; but at the end it is not so. These 
are harlot charms which pleasure wears. 
At last, when industry shall put on her 
beautiful garments, and rest in the palace 
which her own hands have built,, pleasure, 
blotched and diseased with indulgence, shall 
lie down and die upon the dunghill. 

84 



Industry and Idleness. 



4. Example leads to idleness. The chil- 
dren of industrious parents, at the sight 
of vagrant rovers seeking their sports 
wherever they will, disrelish labor and 
envy this unrestrained leisure. At the first 
relaxation of parental vigilance, they shrink 
from their odious tasks. Idleness is begun 
when labor is a burden, and industry a bond- 
age, and only idle relaxation a pleasure. 

The example of political men, office- 
seekers, and public officers is not usually 
conducive to industry. The idea insensi- 
bly fastens upon the mind that greatness 
and hard labor are not companions. The 
inexperience of youth imagines that great 
men are men of great leisure. They see 
them much in public, often applauded and 
greatly followed. How disgusting in con- 
trast is the mechanic's life ! A tinkering 
shop, dark and smutty, is the only theatre 
of his exploits ; and labor, which covers him 
with sweat and fills him with weariness, 
brings neither notice nor praise. The am- 
bitious apprentice, sighing over his soiled 
hands, hates his ignoble work ; neglecting 
it, he aspires to better things, plots in a 
caucus, declaims in a barroom, fights in a 
grogshop, and dies in a ditch. 

5. But the indolence begotten by venal 
ambition must not be so easily dropped. At 
those periods of occasional disaster, when 
embarrassments cloud the face of com- 

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Henry Ward Beecher. 



merce, and trade drags heavily, sturdy la- 
borers forsake industrial occupations and 
petition for office. Had I a son able to gain 
a livelihood by toil, I had rather bury him 
than witness his beggarly supplications for 
office — sneaking along the path of men's 
passions to gain his advantage, holding in 
the breath of his honest opinions, and 
breathing feigned words of flattery to hun- 
gry ears, popular or official, and crawling, 
viler than a snake, through all the unmanly 
courses by which ignoble wretches purloin 
the votes of the dishonest, the drunken, and 
the vile. 

The late reverses of commerce have un- 
settled the habits of thousands. ^Manhood 
seems debilitated, and many sturdy yeomen 
are ashamed of nothing but labor. For a 
farthing-pittance of official salary, for the 
miserable fees of a constable's office, for the 
parings and perquisites of any deputyship, a 
hundred men in every village rush forward, 
scrambling, jostling, crowding, each more 
obsequious than the other to lick the hand 
that holds the omnipotent vote or the starve- 
ling office. The most supple cunning gains 
the prize. Of the disappointed crowd a 
few, rebuked by their sober reflections, go 
back to their honest trade, ashamed and 
cured of office seeking. But the majority 
grumble for a day, then prick forth their 
ears, arrange their feline arts, and mouse 
86 



Industry and Idleness. 



again for another office. The general ap- 
petite for office and disreUsh for industrial 
callings is a prolific source of idleness ; and 
it would be well for the honor of young men 
if they were bred to regard office as fit only 
for those who have clearly shown them- 
selves able and willing to support their fam- 
ilies without it. Xo office can make a 
worthless man respectable, and a man of 
integrity, thrift, and religion has name 
enough without badge or office. 

6. Alen become indolent through the re- 
verses of fortune. Surely, despondency is 
a grievous thing and a heavy load to bear. 
To see disaster and wreck in the present, 
and no light in the future, but only storms, 
lurid by the contrast of past prosperity, and 
growing darker as they advance ; to wear a 
constant expectation of woe like a girdle ; 
to see want at the door, imperiously knock- 
ing, while there is no strength to repel or 
courage to bear its tyranny — indeed, this is 
dreadful enough. But there is a thing 
more dreadful. It is more dreadful if the 
man is wrecked with his fortune. Can 
anything be more poignant in anticipation 
than one's own self, unnerved, cowed down 
and slackened to utter pliancy, and help- 
lessly drifting and driven down the troubled 
sea of life? Of all things on earth, next to 
his God, a broken man should cling to a 
courageous industry. If it brings nothing 
87 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



back and saves nothing, it will save him. 
To be pressed down by adversity has noth- 
ing in it of disgrace ; but it is disgraceful to 
lie down under it like a supple dog. In- 
deed, to stand composedly in the storm, 
amidst its rage and wildest devastations, 
to let it beat over you and roar around you, 
and pass by you, and leave you undismayed, 
this is to be a man. Adversity is the mint in 
which God stamps upon us his image and 
superscription. In this matter men may 
learn of insects. The ant will repair his 
dwelling as often as the mischievous foot 
crushes it ; the spider will exhaust life itself, 
before he will live without a web ; the bee 
can be decoyed from his labor neither by 
plenty nor scarcity. If summer be abun- 
dant, it toils none the less ; if it be par- 
simonious of flowers, the tiny laborer sweeps 
a wider circle, and by industry repairs the 
frugality of the season. ]\Ian should be 
ashamed to be rebuked in vain by the 
spider, the ant, and the bee. 

''Seest thou a man diligent in his busi- 
ness ? He shall stand before kings ; he shall 
not stand before mean men." 

SIX WARNINGS. 

From ''Lectures to Young Men" 

'The generation of the upright shall be blessed, 
wealth and riches shall be in his house." — Ps. 
cxii., 2, 3. 

88 



Six Warnings. 



"He that getteth riches, and not by right, shall 
leave them in the midst of his days, and at the 
end shall be a fool." — Jer. xvii., ii. 

When justly obtained and rationally used, 
riches are called a gift of God, an evidence 
of his favor, and a great reward. When 
gathered unjustly, and corruptly used, 
wealth is pronounced a canker, a rust, a 
fire, a curse. There is no contradiction, 
then, when the Bible persuades to industry 
and integrity by a promise of riches, and 
then dissuades from wealth as a terrible 
thing, destroying soul and body. Bless- 
ings are vindictive to abusers, and kind to 
rightful users ; they serve us, or rule us. 
Fire warms our dwelling, or consumes it. 
Steam serves man, and also destroys him. 
Iron, in the plow, the sickle, the house, the 
ship, is indispensable. The dirk, the as- 
sassin's knife, the cruel sword, and the 
spear are iron also. 

The constitution of man and of society 
alike evinces the design of God. Both are 
made to be happier by the possession of 
riches ; their full development and perfec- 
tion are dependent, to a large extent, upon 
wealth. Without it there can be neither 
books nor implements, neither commerce 
nor arts, neither towns nor cities. It is a 
folly to denounce that, a love of which God 
has placed in man by a constitutional fac- 
ulty, that with which he has associated high 
89 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



grades of happiness, that which has motives 
touching every faculty of the , mind. 
Wealth is an artist — by its patronage men 
are encouraged to paint, to carve, to de- 
sign, to build, and adorn; a master 
mechanic — and inspires man to invent, to 
discover, to apply, to forge, and to fashion ; 
a husbandman — and under its influence men 
rear the flock, till the earth, plant the vine- 
yard, the field, the orchard, and the gar- 
den; a manufacturer — and teaches men to 
card, to spin, to weave, to color, and dress 
all useful fabrics ; a merchant — and sends 
forth ships, and fills warehouses with their 
returning cargoes gathered from every 
zone. It is the scholar's patron ; sustains 
his leisure, rewards his labor, builds the 
college, and gathers the library. 

Is a man weak ? He can buy the strong. 
Is he ignorant ? The learned will serve his 
wealth. ' Is he rude of speech? He may 
procure the advocacy of the eloquent. The 
rich cannot buy honor, but honorable places 
they can ; they cannot purchase nobility, but 
they may its titles. Aloney cannot buy 
freshness of heart, but it can every luxury 
which tempts to enjoyment. Laws are its 
bodyguard, and no earthly power may 
safely defy it, either while running in the 
swift channels of commerce, or reposing in 
the reservoirs of ancient families. Here is 
a wonderful thing, that an inert metal, 
90 



Six Warnings. 



which neither thinks nor feels nor stirs, can 
set the whole world to thinking, planning, 
running, digging, fashioning, and drives on 
the sweaty mass with never-ending labors ! 

Avarice seeks gold, not to build or buy 
therewith, not to clothe or feed itself, not to 
make it an instrument of wisdom, of skill, 
of friendship, or religion. Avarice seeks 
it to heap it up ; to walk around the pile and 
gloat upon it; to fondle and court, to kiss 
and hug the darling stufif to the end of life 
with the homage of idolatry. 

Pride seeks it ; for it gives power and 
place and titles, and exalts its possessor 
above his fellow^s. To be a thread in the 
fabric of life, just like any other thread, 
hoisted up and down by the treadle, played 
across by the shuttle, and woven tightly 
into the piece — this may suit humanity, but 
not pride. 

Vanity seeks it; what else can give it 
costly clothing, and rare ornaments, and 
stately dwellings and showy equipage, and 
attract admiring eyes to its gaudy colors 
and costly jewels? 

Taste seeks it; because by it may be had 
whatever is beautiful, or refining, or in- 
structive. What leisure has poverty for 
study, and how can it collect books, manu- 
scripts, pictures, statues, coins, or curi- 
osities ? 

Love seeks it ; to build a home full of de- 
91 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

lights for father, wife, or child; and, wisest 
of all, 

Religion seeks it; to make it the messen- 
ger and servant of benevolence to want, to 
suffering, and to ignorance. 

What a sight does the busy world present, 
as of a great workshop, where hope and 
fear, love and pride, and lust and pleasure 
and avarice, separate or in partnership, 
drive on the universal race for wealth ; 
delving in the mine, digging in the earth, 
sweltering at the forge, plying the shuttle, 
plowing the waters ; in houses, in shops, in 
stores, on the mountainside or in the valley; 
by skill, by labor, by thought, by craft, by 
force, by traffic — all men, in all places, by 
all labors, fair and unfair, the world around, 
busy, busy; ever searching for wealth, that 
wealth may supply their pleasures. 

As every taste and inclination may re- 
ceive its gratification through riches, the 
universal and often fierce pursuit of it 
arises, not from the single impulse of ava- 
rice, but from the impulse of the whole 
mind; and on this very account its pursuits 
should be more exactly regulated. Let me 
set up a warning over against the special 
dangers which lie along the road to riches. 

I. I warn you against thinking that 
riches necessarily confer happiness, and 
poverty unhappiness. Do not begin life 
supposing that you shall be heart-rich when 
92 



Six Warnings. 



you are purse-rich. A man's happiness de- 
pends primarily upon his disposition ; if 
that be good, riches will bring pleasure ; but 
only vexation, if that be evil. To lavish 
money upon shining trifles, to make an idol 
of one's self for fools to gaze at, to rear 
mansions beyond our wants, to garnish 
them for display and not for use, to chatter 
through the heartless rounds of pleasure, to 
lounge, to gape, to simper and giggle — can 
w^ealth make vanity happy by such folly? 
If wealth descends upon avarice, does it 
confer happiness ? It blights the heart, as 
autumnal fires ravage the prairies. The 
eye glows with greedy cunning, conscience 
shrivels, the light of love goes out, and the 
wretch moves amidst his coin no better, no 
happier, than a loathsome reptile in a mine 
of gold. A dreary fire of self-love burns 
in the bosom of the avaricious rich, as a 
hermit's flam.e in a ruined temple of the 
desert. The fire is kindled for no deity, 
and is odorous with no incense, but only 
warms the shivering anchorite. 

Wealth will do little for lust but to hasten 
its corruption. There is no more happiness 
in a foul heart than there is health in a 
pestilent morass. Satisfaction is not made 
out of such stuff as fighting carousals, ob- 
scene revelry, and midnight orgies. An 
alligator, gorging or swollen with surfeit, 
and basking in the sun, has the same hap- 
93 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



pincss which riches bring to the man who 
eats to gluttony, drinks to drunkenness, and 
sleeps to stupidity. But riches indeed bless 
that heart whose almoner is benevolence. 
If the taste is refined, if the affections are 
pure, if conscience is honest, if charity lis- 
tens to the needy and generosity relieves 
them ; if the public-spirited hand fosters all 
that embellishes and all that ennobles so- 
ciety — then is the rich man happy. 

C3n the other hand, do not suppose that 
poverty is a waste and howling wilderness. 
There is a poverty of vice, mean, loath- 
some, covered with all the sores of deprav- 
ity. There is a poverty of indolence, where 
virtues sleep, and passions fret and bicker. 
There is a poverty which despondency 
makes — a deep dungeon, in which the vic- 
tim wears hopeless chains. ]\Iay God save 
you from that ! There is a spiteful and 
venomous poverty, in which mean and 
cankered hearts, repairing none of their 
own losses, spit at others' prosperity, and 
curse the rich, themselves doubly cursed 
by their own hearts. 

But there is a contented poverty, in 
which industry and peace rule ; and a joyful 
hope, which looks out into another world 
where riches shall neither fly nor fade. This 
poverty may possess an independent mind, 
a heart ambitious of usefulness, a hand 
quick to sow the seed of other men's happi- 
94 



Six Warnings. 



ness, and find its own joy in their enjoy- 
ment. If a serene age finds you in such 
poverty, it is such a wilderness, if it be a 
wilderness, as that in which God led his 
chosen people, and on which he rained every 
day a heavenly manna. 

If God open to your feet the way to 
wealth, enter it cheerfully ; but remember 
that riches will bless or curse you, as your 
own heart determines. But if, circum- 
scribed by necessity, you are still indigent, 
after all your industry, do not scorn pov- 
erty. There is often in the hut more dig- 
nity than in the palace ; more satisfaction in 
the poor man's scanty fare than in the rich 
man's satiety. 

2. ]\Ien are warned in the Bible against 
making haste to be rich. "He that hasteth 
to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth 
not that poverty shall come upon him." 
This is spoken, not of the alacrity of enter- 
prise, but of the precipitancy of avarice. 
That is an evil eye which leads a man into 
trouble by incorrect vision. When a man 
seeks to prosper by crafty tricks instead of 
careful industry; when a man's inordinate 
covetousness pushes him across all lines of 
honesty that he may sooner clutch the prize ; 
when gambling speculation would reap 
where it had not strewn ; when men gain 
riches by crimes — there is an evil eye, which 
guides them through a specious prosperity 
95 



Henry Ward Beechcr. 



to inevitable ruin. So dependent is success 
upon patient industry that he who seeks it 
otherwise tempts his own ruin. A young 
lawyer, unwilling to wait for that practice 
which rewards a good reputation, or unw^ill- 
ing to earn that reputation by severe appli- 
cation, rushes through all the dirty paths of 
chicane to a hasty prosperity, and he rushes 
out of it by the dirtier paths of discovered 
villainy. A young politician, scarcely wait- 
ing till the law allows his majority, sturdily 
begs for that popularity w^hich he should 
have patiently earned. In the ferocious 
conflicts of political life, cunning, intrigue, 
falsehood, slander, vituperative violence, at 
first sustain his pretensions, and at last de- 
molish them. It is thus in all the ways of 
traffic, in all the arts and trades. That 
prosperity which grows like the mushroom 
is as poisonous as the mushroom. Few men 
are destroyed, but many destroy themselves. 

When God sends wealth to bless men, He 
sends it gradually, like a gentle rain. When 
God sends riches to punish men, they come 
tumultuously, like a roaring torrent, tearing 
up landmarks and sweeping all before them 
in promiscuous ruin. Almost every evil 
which environs the path to wealth springs 
from that criminal haste which substitutes 
adroitness for industry, and trick for toil. 

3. Let me warn you against covetous- 
ness. Thou shalt not covet is the law by 
96 



Six Warnings. 



which God sought to bless a favorite people. 
Covetousness is greediness of money. The 
Bible meets it with significant woes, by 
God's hatred, by solemn warnings, by de- 
nunciations, by exclusion from heaven. 
This pecuniary gluttony comes upon the 
competitors for wealth insidiously. At first, 
business is only a means of paying for our 
pleasures. Vanity soon whets the appetite 
for money, to sustain her parade and com- 
petition, to gratify her piques and jealousies. 
Pride throws in fuel for a brighter flame. 
Vindictive hatreds often augment the pas- 
sion, until the whole soul glows as a fervid 
furnace, and the body is driven as a boat 
whose ponderous engine trembles with the 
utmost energy of steam. 

Covetousness is unprofitable. It defeats 
its own purposes. It breeds restless daring 
where it is dangerous to venture. It works 
the mind to fever, so that its judgments are 
not cool nor its calculations calm. Greed 
of money is like fire ; the more fuel it has, 
the hotter it burns. Everything conspires 
to intensify the heat. Loss excites by des- 
peration, and gain by exhilaration. When 
there is fever in the blood, there is fire on 
the brain ; and courage turns to rashness, 
and rashness runs to ruin. 

Covetousness breeds misery. The sight 
of houses better than our own, of dress be- 
yond our means, of jewels costlier than we 
97 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



may wear, of stately equipage and rare curi- 
osities beyond our reach — these hatch the 
viper brood of covetous thoughts ; vexing 
the poor, who would be rich; tormenting 
the rich, who would be richer. The covet- 
ous man pines to see pleasure ; is sad in the 
presence of cheerfulness; and the joy of the 
world is his sorrow, because all the happi- 
ness of others is not his. I do not wonder 
that God ai>hors (Psalms x. 3.) him. He 
inspects his heart, as he would a cave full of 
noisome birds or a nest of rattling reptiles, 
and loathes the sight of its crawling tenants. 
To the covetous man life is a nightmare, and 
God lets him wrestle with it as best he may. 
Mammon might build its palace on such a 
heart, and pleasure bring all its revelry 
there, and honor all its garlands — it would 
be like pleasures in a sepulchre and garlands 
on a tomb. 

The creed of the greedy man is brief and 
consistent, and, unlike other creeds, is both 
subscribed and believed. The chief end of 
man is to glorify gold and enjoy it forever; 
life is a time afforded man to grow rich in ; 
death, the winding up of speculations ; 
heaven, a mart, with golden streets ; hell, a 
place where shiftless men are punished with 
everlasting poverty. 

God searched among the beasts for a fit 
emblem of contempt to describe the end of a 
covetous prince. *'He shall be buried with 
98 



Six Warnings. 



the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth 
beyond the gates of Jerusalem" (Jer. xxii., 
19.) He whose heart is turned to greedi- 
ness, who sweats through life under the load 
of labor only to heap up money, and dies 
without private usefulness or a record of 
public service, is no better in God's estima- 
tion, than a pack horse, a mule, an ass : a 
creature for burdens, to be beaten and 
worked, and killed, and dragged off by 
another like him, abandoned to the birds, 
and forgotten. 

He is buried with the burial of an ass ! 
This is the miser's epitaph — and yours, 
man, if you earn it by covetousness ' 

4. I warn you against selfishness. Of 
riches, it is written : There is no good in 
them but for a man to rejoice and to do good 
in his life. If men absorb their property, it 
parches the heart so that it will not give 
forth blossoms and fruits, but only thorns 
and thistles. If men radiate and reflect 
upon others some rays of the prosperity 
which shines upon themselves, wealth is not 
only harmless, but full of advantage. 

The thoroughfares of wealth are crowded 
by a throng who jostle and thrust and con- 
flict, like men in the tumult of a battle. The 
rules which crafty old men breathe into the 
ears of the young are full of selfish wisdom, 
teaching them that the chief end of man is 
to harvest, to husband, and to hoard. Their 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



life is made obedient to a scale of prefer- 
ences graded from a sordid experience, a 
scale which has penury for one extreme, and 
parsimony for the other ; and the virtues are 
ranked between them as they are relatively 
fruitful in physical thrift. Every crevice of 
the heart is calked with costive maxims, so 
that no precious drop of wealth may leak 
out through inadvertent generosities. In- 
deed, generosity, and all its company, are 
thought to be little better than pilfering pick- 
locks, against whose wiles the heart is pre- 
pared, like a coin vault, with iron-clinched 
walls of stone and impenetrable doors. 
Alercy, pity, and sympathy are vagrant 
fowls ; and, that they may not scale the fence 
between a man and his neighbors, their 
wings are clipped by the miser's master- 
maxim, charity begins at home. It cer- 
tainly stays there. 

The habit of regarding men as dishonest 
rivals dries up, also, the kindlier feelings. 
A shrewd trafficker must watch his fellows, 
be suspicious of their proffers, vigilant of 
their movements, and jealous of their 
pledges. The world's way is a very crooked 
way, and a very guileful one. Its travelers 
creep by stealth, or walk craftily, or glide in 
concealments, or appear in specious guises. 
He who stands out watching among men, to 
pluck his advantage from their hands, or to 
lose it by their wiles, comes, at length, to re- 
100 



Six Warnings. 



gard all men as either enemies or instru- 
ments. Of course, he thinks it fair to strip 
an enemy, and just as fair to use an instru- 
ment. ]\Ien are no more to him than bales, 
boxes, or goods — mere matters of traffic. If 
he ever relaxes his commercial rigidity to 
indulge in the fictions of poetry, it is when, 
perhaps, on Sundays or at a funeral, he talks 
quite prettily about friendship and generosity 
and philanthropy. The tightest ship may 
leak in a storm, and an unbartered penny 
may escape from this man when the surprise 
of the solicitation gives no time for thought. 

The heart cannot wholly petrify without 
some honest revulsions. Opiates are admin- 
istered to it. This business man tells his 
heart that it is beset by unscrupulous ene- 
mies, that beneficent virtues are doors to let 
them in, that liberality is bread given to 
one's foes, and selfishness only self-defense. 
At the same time, he enriches the future 
with generous promises. While he is get- 
ting rich, he cannot afford to be liberal ; but, 
when once he is rich, ah! how liberal he 
nieans to be ! As though habits could be 
unbuckled like a girdle, and were not rather 
steel bands riveted, defying the edge of any 
man's resolution, and clasping the heart with 
invincible servitude ! 

Thorough selfishness destroys or para- 
lyzes enjoyment. A heart made selfish by 
the contest for wealth is like a citadel 
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Henry Ward Beecher. 



stormed in war. The banner of victory 
waves over dilapidated walls, desolate cham- 
bers, and magazines riddled with artillery. 
Men, covered with sweat and begrimed with 
toil, expect to find joy in a heart reduced by 
selfishness to a smoldering heap of ruins. 

I warn every aspirant for wealth against 
the infernal canker of selfishness. It will 
eat out of the heart with the fire of hell, or 
bake it harder than a stone. The heart of 
avaricious old age stands like a bare rock in 
a bleak wilderness, and there is no rod of 
authority, nor incantation of pleasure, which 
can draw from it one crystal drop to quench 
the raging thirst for satisfaction. But lis- 
ten not to my words alone; hear the sol- 
emn voice of God, pronouncing doom upon 
the selfish : ''Your riches are corrupted, and 
your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold 
and silver is cankered ; and the rust of them 
shall be a witness against you, and shall eat 
your flesh as it wxre fire.'' (James v., 2, 3.) 

5. I warn you against seeking wealth 
by covert dishonesty. The everlasting plea 
of petty fraud or open dishonesty is its ne- 
cessity or profitableness. 

It is neither necessary nor profitable. The 
hope is a deception and the excuse a lie. 
The severity of competition affords no rea- 
son for dishonesty in word or deed. Com- 
petition is fair, but not all methods of com- 
petition. A mechanic may compete with a 
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Six Warnings. 



mechanic by rising earlier, by greater indus- 
try, by greater skill, more punctuality, 
greater thoroughness, by employing better 
materials, by a more scrupulous fidelity to 
promises, and by facility in accommodation. 
A merchant may study to excel competitors 
by a better selection of goods, by more obli- 
ging manners, by more rigid honesty, by a 
better knowledge of the market, by better 
taste in the arrangement of his goods. In- 
dustry, honesty, kindness, taste, genius, and 
skill are the only material of all rightful 
competition. 

But, whenever you have exerted all your 
knowledge, all your skill, all your industry, 
with long-continued patience and without 
success, then it is clear, not that you may 
proceed to employ trick and cunning, but 
that you must stop. God has put before you 
a bound which no man may overleap. There 
may be the appearance of gain on the knav- 
ish side of the wall of honor. Traps are al- 
ways baited with food sweet to the taste of 
the intended victim ; and Satan is too crafty 
a trapper not to scatter the pitfalls of dis- 
honesty with some shining particles of gold. 

But, what if fraud were necessary to per- 
manent success? Will you take success 
upon such terms ? I perceive, too often, that 
young men regard the argument as ended 
when they prove to themselves that they can- 
not be rich without guile. Very well ; then 
103 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



be poor. But, if you prefer money to honor, 
you may well swear fidelity to the villain's 
law ! If it is not base and detestable to gain 
by equivocation, neither is it by lying; and, 
if not by lying, neither is it by stealing ; and, 
if not by stealing, neither by robbery nor 
murder. Will you tolerate the loss of honor 
and honesty for the sake of profit ? For ex- 
actly this Judas betrayed Christ, and Arnold 
his country. Because it is the only way to 
gain some pleasure, may a wife yield her 
honor, a politician sell himself, a statesman 
barter his counsel, a judge take bribes, a 
juryman forswear himself, or a witness com- 
mit perjury? Then, virtues are marketable 
commodities, and may be hung up, like meat 
in the shambles, or sold at auction to the 
highest bidder. 

Who can afiford a victory gained by a de- 
feat of his virtue? What prosperity can 
compensate the plundering of a man's heart ? 
''A good name is rather to be chosen than 
great riches sooner or later every man will 
find it so. 

With what dismay would Esau have sor- 
rowed for a lost birthright, had he lost also 
the pitiful mess of pottage for which he sold 
it ? With what double despair would Judas 
have clutched at death, if he had not ob- 
tained even the thirty pieces of silver which 
were to pay his infamy? And with what 
utter confusion will all dishonest men who 
104 



Six Warnings. 



were learning of the devil to defraud other 
men, find, at length, that he was giving his 
most finished lesson of deception — by cheat- 
ing them, and making poverty and disgrace 
the only fruit of the lies and frauds which 
were framed for profit ! ''Getting treasure 
by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to and 
fro of them that seek death." 

Men have only looked upon the beginning 
of a career when they pronounce upon the 
profitableness of dishonesty. Many a ship 
goes gayly out of harbor which never re- 
turns again. That only is a good voyage 
which brings home the richly-freighted ship. 
God explicitly declares that an inevitable 
curse of dishonesty shall fall upon the crim- 
inal himself, or upon his children : ''He that 
by usury and unjust gain increaseth his sub- 
stance, he shall gather it for him that will 
pity the poor. His children are far from 
safety, and they are crushed in the gate. 
Neither is there any to deliver them ; the 
robber swalloweth up their substance." 

Iniquities, whose end is dark as midnight, 
are permitted to open bright as the morning ; 
the most poisonous bud unfolds with bril*- 
liant colors. So the threshold of perdition 
is burnished till it glows like the gate of 
Paradise. "There is a way which seemeth 
right unto a man, but the ends thereof are 
the ways of death." This is dishonesty de- 
scribed to the life. At first you look down 
105 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

upon a smooth and verdant path, covered 
with flowers, perfumed with odors and over- 
hung with fruits and grateful shade. Its 
long perspective is illusive, for it ends 
quickly in a precipice, over which you pitch 
into irretrievable ruin. 

For the sources of this inevitable disaster 
we need look no farther than the effect of 
dishonesty upon a man's own mind. The 
difference between cunning and wisdom is 
the difference between acting by the certain 
and immutable laws of nature and acting by 
the shifts of temporary expedients. An 
honest man puts his prosperity upon the 
broad current of those laws which govern 
the world. A crafty man means to pry be- 
tween them, to steer across them, to take ad- 
vantage of them. An honest man steers by 
God's chart, and a dishonest man by his own. 
Which is the most liable to perplexities and 
fatal mistakes of judgment? Wisdom 
steadily ripens to the end ; cunning is worm- 
bitten, and soon drops from the tree. 

I could repeat the names of many men 
(every village has such, and they swarm in 
cities) who are skillful, indefatigable, but 
audaciously dishonest; and, for a time, they 
seemed going straight forward to the realm 
of wealth. I never knew a single one to 
avoid ultimate ruin. Men who act under 
dishonest passions are like men riding fierce 
horses. It is not always with the rider when 
106 



Six Warnings. 



or where he shall stop. If, for his sake, the 
steed dashes wildly on while the road is 
smooth, so, turning suddenly into a rough 
and dangerous way, the rider must go madly 
forward for the steed's sake — now chafed, 
his mettle up, his eyes afire, and beast and 
burden, like a bolt speeding through the air, 
until some bound or sudden fall tumble both 
to the ground, a crushed and mangled mass. 

A man pursuing plain ends by honest 
means may be "troubled on every side, yet 
not distressed ; perplexed, but not in despair ; 
persecuted, but not forsaken ; cast down, but 
not destroyed." But those that pursue their 
advantage by a round of dishonesties, "when 
fear cometh as a desolation, and destruction 
as a v/hirlwind, when distress and anguish 
come upon them, .... shall eat of 
the fruit of their own way, and be filled with 
their own devices ; for the turning away of 
the simple shall slay them, and the prosper- 
ity of fools destroy them." 

6. The Bible overflows with warnings 
to those who gain wealth by violent extor- 
tion, or by any flagrant villany. Some men 
stealthily slip from under them the posses- 
sions of the poor. Some beguile the simple 
and heedless of their patrimony. Some 
tyrannize over ignorance, and extort from it 
its- fair domains. Some steal away the 
senses and intoxicate the mind, the more 
readily and largely to cheat ; some set their 
107 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



traps in all the dark places of men's ad- 
versity, and prowl for wrecks all along the 
shores on which men's fortunes go to pieces. 
Men will take advantage of extreme misery 
to wring it with more griping tortures, and 
compel it to the extremest sacrifices ; and 
stop only when no more can be borne by the 
sufferer, or nothing more extracted by the 
usurer. The earth is as full of avaricious 
monsters as the tropical forests are of beasts 
of prey. But amid all the lions and tigers 
and hyenas is seen the stately bulk of three 

huge BEHEMOTHS. 

The first behemoth is that incarnate fiend 
who navigates the ocean to traffic in human 
misery and freight with the groans and tears 
of agony. Distant shores are sought with 
cords and manacles, villages surprised with 
torch and sword, and the loathsome ship 
swallows what the sword and the fire have 
spared. By night and day the voyage 
speeds, and the storm spares wretches more 
relentless than itself. The wind wafts and 
the sun lights the path for a ship whose log 
is written in blood. Hideous profits, drip- 
ping red, even at this hour, lure these infer- 
nal miscreants to their remorseless errands. 
The thirst of gold inspires such courage, 
skill, and cunning vigilance that the thun- 
ders of four allied navies cannot sink the in- 
famous fleet. 

What wonder ? Just such a behemoth of 
108 



Six Warnings. 



rapacity stalks among us, and fattens on 
the blood of our sons. Men there are who, 
without a pang or gleam of remorse, will 
coolly wait for character to rot, and health 
to sink, and means to melt, that they may 
suck up the last drop of the victim's blood. 
Our streets are full of reeling wretches 
whose bodies and manhood and souls have 
been crushed and put to the press, that mon- 
sters might wring out of them a wine for 
their infernal thirst. The agony of mid- 
night massacre, the frenzy of the ship's dun- 
geon, the living death of the middle passage, 
the wails of separation, and the dismal tor- 
por of hopeless servitude — are these found 
only in the piracy of the slave trade ? They 
are all among us ! Worse assassinations ! 
Worse dragging to a prison ship ! Worse 
groans ringing from the fetid hold ! Worse 
separations of families ! Worse bondage of 
intemperate men, enslaved by that most in- 
exorable of all taskmasters, sensual habit ! 

The third behemoth is seen lurking 
among the Indian savages, and bringing the 
arts of learning and the skill of civilization 
to aid in plundering the debauched barba- 
rian. The cunning, murdering, scalping 
Indian is no match for the Christian white 
man. Compared with the midnight knavery 
of men reared in schools, rocked by religion, 
tempered and taught by the humane institu- 
tions of liberty and civilization, all the craft 
109 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

of the savage is twilight. Vast estates have 
been accumulated without having an honest 
farthing in them. Our penitentiaries might 
be sent to school to the treaty-grounds and 
council-grounds. Smugglers and swindlers 
might humble themselves in the presence of 
Indian traders. All the crimes against 
property known to our laws flourish with 
unnatural vigor, and some unknown to civ- 
ilized villany. To swindle ignorance, to 
overreach simplicity, to lie without scruple 
to any extent, from mere implication dow^n 
to perjury; to tempt the savages to rob each 
other, and to receive their plunder; to sell 
goods at incredible prices to the sober In- 
dian, then to intoxicate him, and steal them 
all back by a sham bargain, to be sold again 
and stolen again; to employ falsehood, lust, 
threats, whisky, and even the knife and the 
pistol ; in short, to consume the Indian's sub- 
stance by every vice and crime possible to 
an unprincipled heart inflamed with an in- 
satiable rapacity, unwatched by justice, and 
unrestrained by law — this it is to be an In- 
dian trader. I would rather inherit the 
bowels of Vesuvius, or make my bed in Etna, 
than own those estates which have been 
scalped off from human beings as the hunter 
strips a beaver of its fur ! Of all these, of 
all who gain possessions by extortion and 
robbery, never let yourself be envious ! 'T 
was envious at the foolish, when I saw the 
110 



Six Warnings. 



prosperity of the wicked. Their eyes stand 
out with fatness ; they have more than heart 
could wish. They are corrupt, and speak 
wickedly concerning oppression. They 
have set their mouth against the heaven, 
and their tongue walketh through the earth. 
When I sought to know this, it was too pain- 
ful for me, until I went into the sanctuary. 
Surely, thou didst set them in slippery 
places ! Thou castedst them down into de- 
struction as in a moment ! They are utterly 
consumed with terrors. As a dream when 
one awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awak- 
est. Thou shalt despise their image !" 

I would not bear their heart who have so 
made money, were the world a solid globe 
of gold, and mine. I would not stand for 
them in the judgment, were every star of 
heaven a realm of riches, and mine. I 
would not walk with them the burning marl 
of hell, to bear their torment, and utter their 
groans, for the throne of God itself. 

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole 
matter. Riches got by deceit cheat no man 
so much as the getter. Riches bought with 
guile, God will pay for with vengeance. 
Riches got by fraud are dug out of one's 
own heart, and destroy the mine. Unjust 
riches curse the owner in getting, in keep- 
ing, in transmitting. They curse his chil- 
dren in their father's memory, in their own 
111 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

wasteful habits, in drawing around them all 
bad men to be their companions. 

While I do not discourage your search for 
wealth, I warn you that it is not a cruise 
upon level seas and under bland skies. You 
advance where ten thousand are broken in 
pieces before they reach the mart ; where 
those who reach it are worn out, by their 
labors, past enjoying their riches. You seek 
a land pleasant to the sight, but dangerous 
to the feet ; a land of fragrant winds, which 
lull to security; of golden fruits which are 
poisonous ; of glorious hues, which dazzle 
and mislead. 

You may be rich and be pure ; but it will 
cost you a struggle. You may be rich and 
go to heaven; but ten, doubtless, will sink 
beneath their riches, where one breaks 
through them to heaven. If you have en- 
tered this shining way, begin to look for 
snares and traps. Go not careless of your 
danger, and provoking it. See, on every 
side of you, how many there are who seal 
God's word with their blood : 

''They that will be rich fall into tempta- 
tion, and a snare, and into many foolish and 
hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruc- 
tion and perdition. For the love of money 
is the root of all evil, which, while some 
have coveted after, they have erred from the 
faith, and pierced themselves through with 
many sorrows.'' 

112 



THE PARASITE WASTE. 



From ''The Wastes and Burdens of Society." 

A parasite i-s an animal organized to get 
its living out of somebody else. It does not 
work ; it sucks for a living. Of course, you 
know what a vegetable parasite is, the red 
spider, and the green aphis and aphides 
everywhere ; we know what animal parasites 
are, intestinal or exterior ; but the worst par- 
asites in the world are human parasites, and 
society is full of them. All healthy men, 
competent to work, but unwilling, who live 
upon society without giving an equivalent, I 
call parasites. The young man has had 
some ambition ; he has run through his ac- 
tive energies, and he loiters about the streets, 
morning and noon and night, and picks up a 
living. Providence may know how. At last, 
he comes to that condition in which, having 
chanced one day in church, to hear, from the 
noble old Book : "Go to the ant, thou slug- 
gard ; consider her ways, and be wise." Off 
he goes to his aunt, and lives on her after 
that. All vicious men, and men that come 
to the legitimate results of vice, all criminal 
men that forsake industries and live by war- 
fare, open or secret, I call parasites. These 
that become the offscouring of communities, 
that ichorously drop from stage to stage, 
and at the bottom form a malarious mud — 
113 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



these parasites of society are wasters ; and I 
have a right to denounce vice and crime and 
all the courses that lead to them, not alone 
upon high moral principle, not alone upon 
mere schedules of morality, but because they 
are my enemies, and your enemies, and they 
bleed us and suck us ; they are vermin that 
infest our bodies and our families. And, if 
these classes are vicious, criminal, and para- 
sitic, how much more are they that make 
them, those whose very trade and livelihood 
consist in making vicious and criminal para- 
sites in a community ? The men that make 
drunkards are worse than the drunkards. 
The men that make gamblers are worse than 
the gamblers. The men that furnish lust, 
wdth its material, are worst than those that 
are overcome by the lust. 

And yet, when we preach a doctrine of re- 
striction, and ask for laws that should hold 
in these parasites of society, what a clamor 
is raised ! We are interfering with the lib- 
erty of men ; they have a right to support 
their families. Especially, they say, "\Miat 
has a minister got to do with this business ? 
Why does not he attend to preaching the 
gospel of peace? Why does he come out 
and interfere with the avocations of men in 
society?" I was a citizen before I was a 
minister, and I do it as a man and citizen, 
not as a professional minister : yet I would 
do it that way rather than let it go undone, 
114 



The Parasite Waste. 



for I am one of those who do not believe iii 
that kind of minister that seems to be a cross 
between a man and a woman. There was a 
time when a man with a hectic cheek and 
sunken eye was supposed to be near heaven, 
and fitted to teach men and young men in 
the proportion in which he was going to the 
grave himself. Times are changed, and 
now men are robust and strong, open-eyed 
men, and they are ministers because they are 
men, and have practical, humane thoughts 
and sympathies, living among men as men, 
and not lifted above men on some velvet 
shelf, where, by reason of their mere exter- 
nals, they are considered above and better 
than the average of human nature. Either 
way, I think it is the duty of every moral 
teacher to scourge the makers of vices and 
the makers of crimes, and the men that in- 
validate the health or morality of the great 
body of the community. And there is an- 
other reason why I have a right to speak 
out. You declare that I have no right to 
meddle with other people's business. No ; 
but I have a right to take care of my own 
business. My sons and daughters are dear 
to me, and, when men do wrong about them 
by lures and temptations and snares, for hu- 
manity's sake, as well as for parental affec- 
tion and love, I have a right to interfere. 

And I hold that that is a sphere in which, 
above all others, a woman has a right to in- 
115 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

terfere. What are called woman's rights 
are simply the rights of human beings, and, 
before a woman can do right and well in the 
direction of humanity and virtue, she has a 
right to vote. In our land, the vote is rap- 
idly becoming the magister, as things go 
with us, and more and more throughout all 
civilized countries the power of the vote is 
increasing. I hold that a woman has the 
right to vote ; but, if you withhold from her 
on any considerations of supposed propriety 
voting for the remote questions of civility, 
there is one sphere where a woman is not 
allowed to vote, and where she ought to 
have a vote. She brings forth children in 
pain, she spends and squanders her life on 
them, bringing them up from infancy and 
helplessness to manhood and strength ; and, 
if there is one creature on the earth that has 
a right to vote what sort of school there 
should be in a district, what teacher should 
be there, for how many months it should be 
kept open, what should be taught in it — if 
there is one person who has a right to speak 
of the gambling dens and drinking hells that 
are round about her family, it is the mother 
of the children ; and, in all police relations, 
and educational matters, and everything that 
touches the virtue and morality of society, 
our civilization will not be perfected until 
it should be, as it is in religion, that man and 
woman stand before God equal and alike. 
116 



The Waste of Misfits. 

There is another aspect of this matter of 
the criminal classes that is worthy a mo- 
ment's consideration. It is industry that 
pays for laziness ; it is virtue that pays for 
vice ; it is law-abiding and God-fearing men 
that pay for unprincipled men's misdeeds. 
All the waste of society is made up by the 
virtuous elements in it. I am taxed, you are 
taxed, heavily — taxed not for humanity in 
the care of the disabled poor — that tax we 
pay cheerfully — but you are taxed, and I am 
taxed, for the ignorance, for the vice, for the 
crime, for the laziness, of all the parasitic 
forces of human society. I am content 
when I am taxed by our law that applies 
equally to every one, but the pickpocket has 
no right to put his hand in my pocket, and 
the grogseller has no right to levy taxes on 
me. The vices of society are the most ar- 
rogant of tax-gatherers ; they lay the im- 
posts themselves ; they themselves declare 
how much men shall pay ; they collect it 
themselves ; you stand by, and pay for the 
devil's wages. 

THE WASTE OF MISFITS. 
From ''The Wastes and Burdens of Society/' 

One thing is very certain, that no man 
can do his best work except along the line of 
his strongest faculties. Sometimes men do 
not know what the line of their strongest 
117 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



faculties is, and very often nobody else 
knows. And yet, when you look at society, 
and the adaptations of men, this misfit of 
men to function is very pitiful. The best 
strength of men is wasted often. There are 
men most conscientious, most serenely sweet 
and pure, and pious, digging and delving 
away in the pulpit where they are not fitted 
to be. A man that is fitted for the pulpit is 
a man that has the genius of moral ideas, 
and there are a great many men that have 
not the genius of moral ideas, or any other, 
and yet they are in the pulpit. I can say 
this with the more boldness here, as I have 
so many ministers present. 

But, did it ever occur to you that, of all 
the mysteries in this world, the greatest are 
not religious mysteries, not the Trinity, not 
Atonement, not decrees, not election, not any 
of these things ? The mystery of this world 
is how men were created and shoved on to 
this globe, and let alone. W^hatever has 
been revealed in Old or New^ Testament that 
tells of man, is that he has got a brain, and 
that it is a seat of intelligence, but it has been 
only within my memory that men have been 
taught that brains were of any use. Hun- 
dreds of men do not believe it yet. Ages 
went away before a man knew what the 
heart was for, or what it was doing. ■Men 
w^ere not told in the early day, neither by 
writing on the heavens nor by words spoken 
118 



The Waste of Misfits. 



by the prophet, nor was it made known by 
any philosophy, what the structure of their 
own bodies was, and the relation of their 
bodily condition to the outward world, which 
itself also was a wilderness of ideas. They 
had no idea of what was its organization ; 
they were left as perfectly helpless as a child 
in the nursery, and it was through hundreds 
and thousands of years that men groped and 
groped and died, when the medicine was 
right under their feet in the vegetable 
world; although there was the remedy, no 
voice told them of it. What if I put a child 
on the footboard of a locomotive, and say : 
''Run this Flying Dutchman five hundred 
miles, and it will be death if you come to 
any accident." The human body is a more 
complicated piece of machinery than any en- 
gine, yet for ages and ages, until our day, 
men have had no considerable insight either 
into their own structure, or into the relations 
of the physical world, or into the highest 
problems that belong to morality or religion. 

And, even now, when a young man of fif- 
teen or sixteen wants to know what he is fit 
for, who can tell him ? He goes to the doc- 
tor, who sounds his heart and lungs, and 
says: "You are healthy." ''Well, what 
should a healthy young man do?" "Oh, 
you had better go to the schoolmaster." 
The schoolmaster says : "Are you advanced 
in mathematics? Do you know something 
119 . 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

about history and political economy?" 
'' Yes ; what would you recommend me to do 
for my livelihood?'' "Well, anything that 
happens to come to hand.'' He can give 
him no direction. He goes to the minister, 
and his minister says to him : "Have you 
been baptized? Do you say your prayers 
every morning and night? Do you believe 
in the creed?" ''Well, sir, what do you 
recommend me to do as my life business?" 
''Well, I commend you to Providence." The 
minister is as ignorant as the man is — the 
blind leading the blind. In this condition of 
things, is it strange that men should take to 
their professions, not from an elective affin- 
ity, not becausce they feel an impulse to run 
along the lines of their strongest faculties, 
but from ambition, and from the promise of 
gain, and from misguiding love? Here is 
a man, a bricklayer, and he has organized 
industry and acquired great wealth, and his 
family increases amain. His eldest son they 
set up in business, and he has inherited from 
his father business tact. The second son 
grows up, and the mother says : "Well, now, 
James is a very conscientious boy, and I 
think we had better make a lawyer of him." 
They do, and he utterly fails. They say : 
"WilHam? William seems to have parts, 
and has an interest in nature ; I think we had 
better make him a doctor. That is a very 
respectable calling ; we will make a doctor of 
120 



The Waste of Misfits. 

\\'illiam. As to Thomas, he is a good boy ; 
he is not very strong in body, and he is not 
so bright in mind as the other children, but 
he would make a good minister," and so the 
parental idea is not "What are my children 
fitted for?" but "What is respectable? What 
will give them standing in the opinion of 
their fellowmen?" And so. men are perpet- 
ually going to things that are above their 
capacity, and other men in various con- 
ditions of life are toiling in spheres that are 
below their capacity. \\'hat if a farmer 
should harness greyhounds together and 
plow with them ? \Miat if racing on the 
track was to be made by oxen ? An ox is 
for strength, a greyhound for speed : but 
men are greyhounds where they ought to be 
oxen, and oxen where they ought to be grey- 
hounds, all their lives. How should they 
know? By their blunders, mostly. How 
often most admirable men of ideas are mere 
copyists ! They generate thought, they have 
latent poetry in them, they have latent in- 
spirations : if they had been put in the right 
avenues, and under the right inspirations, 
these men would have been great thinkers, 
and their life like the outpouring of music. 
And there are men on the judges' bench, 
holding the court, who would have made 
good and excellent farmers, and not a few 
men in the blacksmith forge, and in the 
stithy, or in the mines, who would have been 
121 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



excellent citizens ; but they are all mixed up 
like a keg of nails. There is many a laboring 
man that would have made a good exhorter 
and a good preacher, and there are many 
preachers that evidently were not "called." 
When God calls a man to preach. He always 
calls an audience to go and hear him. There 
is many a man thinks he has heard a call, 
and doubtless he did, but it was somebody 
else's call. I think I do not err when I say 
that one-half of the energy of life is badly 
applied, and that, too. which is adapted for 
the superior functions of human life. There 
has got to be a great light arise in that di- 
rection. 

THE WASTE OF LYING. 
From ''The Wastes and Burdens of Society/' 

Then, the next great mischief, which you 
will hear gratefully, because we always like 
to hear the faults discussed which we do not 
find in ourselves, is lying. Craft is the re- 
mainder of the animal life that inheres in 
man, for weakness in the presence of 
strength is obliged to resort to craft, to dig 
under, to go sideways. Concealment be- 
longs to weakness in the presence of des- 
potic strength. Slavery always produces 
lying subjects, and in the struggle for life 
among men the weak seek to make up their 
deficiencies of strength by craft. And it is 
not always the weak, either, that do it, for 
122 



The Waste of Lying 

men have an impression that truth, pure and 
unadulterated, is hke twenty-two carat gold, 
too soft to w^ear ordinarily, and that it must 
be adulterated to about eighteen carat, and 
then it is tough enough to go. They say a 
judicious mixture between a truth and a lie 
is the true currency, and they do not believe 
in truth. On no subject in this world is 
there a greater lack of faith than truth. You 
may have faith in the Transfiguration, and 
faith in immortality, but you have not faith 
in the safety of telling the truth everyw^here 
and always. I am one of those that believe 
the truth ought to be told w^henever you tell 
anything. It is not necessary that a man 
should ahvays tell everything ; but, wdiatever 
he tells, it is necessary that that should al- 
w^ays be truth. A man has a right to con- 
cealment. The soul has no more business 
to go stark naked dowm the street than a 
man has to go stark naked as regards his 
body. It is the preservation of social life 
and of individual life, and the man that has 
not a great silence in him, a great reserve in 
him, is not half a man — he is a babbler ; he 
leaks at the mouth. All this talk about be- 
nevolent lies, white lies, and the customary 
lies of society, I abhor the w^hole raff of it. 
But mtn say : ''Would you advise a phys- 
ician to tell a man that he is going straight 
down to death?" He will have to die, and 
lying will not prevent it. "But, suppose a 
123 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



man were to come to your house for protec- 
tion, and you conceal him there, and the sol- 
diers are right after him in times of civil 
war, and they asked : 'Has So-and-so been 
here ?' would you say : 'Yes, he was here 
ten hours ago ; we gave him a glass of milk ; 
he is in the forest; go after him and get 
him or would you say : 'The man is hid in 
the house now?' Men say: 'Would you 
betray him? Don't you think it is right to 
lie for benevolence?' No. I do not. 
"Would you tell the truth to a robber, when 
the life of your children depended upon it?" 
Probably not ; but that has nothing to do 
with the principle. I may be weak enough 
to tell a lie; but that does not justify a lie, 
nor me in telling it; and, when a man ap- 
peals to the weakness of a man to justify a 
lie, you do not advance in any way toward 
the truth. I hold that the hardest thing in 
this world is for a man habitually to tell the 
truth. A man who tells the truth is like a 
man who lives in a glass house, and every- 
body that goes by sees what he is doing 
there. A man that tells the truth has to be 
very symmetrical in his character ; he has 
got to be really a good man, and righteous, 
or he cannot afford to tell the truth. 

Now, the political economy of the matter 
is this, that lying disintegrates society. Men 
are united together in the great interests of 
human life by trust. On an average, they 
124 



The Waste of Lying. 

believe when a man says a thing ; when he 
says he has done a thing, they take it for 
granted. We could not live if we could not 
believe in men. "William, have you depos- 
ited those checks in the bank?" ''Yes, sir, I 
have." '']^Iaybe he has, maybe he has 
not ; I will go round to the bank and see." 
''Has my clerk deposited checks for one 
thousand pounds in the bank to-day?*' 
"Yes," says the cashier, "he has." "But 
there may be a collusion between him and 
some of the bank officers ; I will go inside 
and see." "Is your cashier to be believed 
when he says my clerk has deposited one 
thousand pounds?" If a man had to do all 
that circumlocution in his business, he would 
not have time to do anything else but to 
look round. We cannot get organized, 
combined strength unless a man is trusted, 
and, the nioment a man is known not to be 
trusted, there begins the process of separa- 
tion, and the progress of all human life be- 
gins in the belief that men substantially tell 
the truth, yien say society is full of lies. 
Yes, it is full of lies. There is a great deal 
of lying in all sorts of business, except the 
pulpit ; and the philosophy of that is at once 
exposed as a false philosophy in this, that, if 
lying were more common than speaking the 
truth, society would be like a heap of sand — 
it would fall apart. The cohesion is the be- 
lief in men's veracity. The fact is that a lie 
/ 125 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



has to have a cutting edge of truth, or it 
would not be worth anything. It is the 
truth that works a lie into anything like vic- 
tory. On the street, in the shop, in the man- 
ufactory, on the ship, at home and abroad, 
the implication is that a man is to be relied 
upon for his word or bond, and, if you take 
that away, society goes back into original 
elements, and is shipwrecked, and every- 
thing that tends to separate the confidence 
of man in man impedes business, and makes 
it more and more laborious. If you join to- 
this dishonesty — lying and dishonesty — you 
double the weight of the armor that a man 
has to carry ; thicker walls are needed, mul- 
tiplied watchers ; like the old armor of 
knights, that weighed more than a man and 
a horse together, society is obliged to armor 
itself. I have sometimes thought that, if 
there might be a miracle in New York, and 
God should make every man honest and 
truthful, they would not know one another 
next day, and the hull would come up many 
feet in the water. You may not believe 
it, but I tell you that the permanent prosper- 
ity of society is to be derived not from the 
basilar faculties, but from the coronal. All 
those influences, therefore, that tend to make 
the violation of a man's word and pledge 
easy ought to be swept out of society. 

Then, there is a false notion that men 
are more likely to tell the truth under oath 
126 



The Waste of Lying. 



than they are without an oath. A man that 
will not tell the truth without an oath won't 
tell the truth with an oath. You cannot 
make a man honest by machinery. There 
has got to be established in him an automatic 
honesty, an honesty individual. Therefore, 
I do not believe in the oaths of our courts. 
In the old days of superstition, men be- 
lieved that by a reference to arms on the bat- 
tlefield God would always decide for the 
right. That has been exploded, and duels 
and conflicts for the sake of truth are all 
gone in the lumber-room of heathendom, as 
well as the old superstition w^th regard to a 
man standing before a mysterious deity, and 
sw^earing on the penalty of his soul, when he 
did not believe he had a soul, and did not be- 
lieve there was much penalty. And see 
how oaths have passed into disrepute by the 
mode of prescribing them. Here is an hon- 
est, simple-hearted man, who has never been 
in a court or through a trial ; he comes in 
rather tremulous, and goes in behind the 
witness-box. See how the clerk administers 
the oath to him. He holds out the Bible, as 
if there was some emanation from the Bible 
that would make him tell the truth. But 
some witnesses would not swear and stick to 
it on a Bible merely ; the Bible must have a 
cross on it ; that gives it extra sanctity. 
Then he is made to kiss it. Was there ever 
any superstition more abject than that? 
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Henry Ward Beecher. 



Then the clerk gets up, and says to the man 
who is waiting to be honest : 'Tn the case of 
John Doe versus Richard Roe, you swear — 
mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble." It 
gradually dawns on him that he is sworn to 
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 
but the truth. Then the judge and the 
lawyers on each side are determined he shall 
not tell the truth, and that he shall lie, and, 
when he goes off the stand, he does not 
know whether he is on his head or his feet. 
That is called sifting the evidence. 

I do not believe in custom-house oaths. 
I do not believe in custom houses anyhow. 
I think they are manufactories of lies. I 
have got to swear when I go back — I have 
felt like it many times, but I have got to do 
it — that I have nothing in my trunks, or 
about me, contrary to the custom laws of 
my country. I know nothing about the cus- 
tom laws of my country ; I do not know 
whether they admit a jackknife. I am 
wearing all new clothes, so I can say I have 
nothing but what I wear. It is inherent in 
the oath that it is morally weak. Every, 
man who has to do with the custom house 
has a clerk who swears for the firm, who 
goes down to the custom house, and does 
the swearing there. These custom-house 
oaths are simply ridiculous. 

But there is another kind of oath, though 
not quite so frequent, and perhaps not so de- 
128 



The Waste of Lying. 

moralizing, yet hardly less disgraceful, when 
a green young man, fresh from the college 
or the seminary, who has had his theology 
put into him as sausages are filled, goes be- 
fore the council, or the conference, or the con- 
vention, or whatever may be the machine, 
and takes oath that he will preach the doc- 
trines of the confession, or of the creed, as 
they have been interpreted by the Church. 
For a year or two he does not know^ any- 
thing better than to go on doing it ; but, by 
and by, what, with books and collateral light 
and intercourse with men, and the progress 
of science, the man begins to have wider 
thoughts, and very soon he sees that he can- 
not preach on that doctrine, so he holds his 
tongue about it; and there begins to rise 
from the horizon to him the bright and 
morning star — yea, it may be the very Sun 
of Righteousness ; but he has taken an oath 
that he will not preach anything but what 
is in the book, as if a book ever contained 
the Lord God Almighty and all creation. 
What does he do? He compromises, and 
holds his tongue, or else the conditions of 
fellowship are such that he sacrifices every- 
thing that is dear to a man. All his roots in 
the past and all social affections bind him to 
this particular communion ; but, for the sake 
of truth, he suffers himself to be expatriated 
and cast out, and the world says : "If a man 
belongs to that denomination, he ought to 
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Henry Ward Beecher. 



teach what the denomination believes, or 
leave it," as if there was nothing else than 
getting a salary — as if a man did not feel 
that the truth in his hands was the test of his 
allegiance to Almighty God. Ordination 
oaths lay men's consciences under bondage, 
for I hold, and the world will yet agree to it, 
that a godly life is orthodox, and no ortho- 
doxy that does not carry love behind it is 
orthodox. 

WHAT IS MORAL INTUITION ? 
From "Conscience/' 

What is intuitional force? It is a word 
very much used, "moral intuition." What 
definition can I give to it? I cannot give 
any definition to it, but some illustrations of 
it. It exists in a lower or higher degree, 
not in regard to right and wTong alone, but 
in regard to almost every form of thought 
and feeling. Where any faculty exists in 
great strength, or where, under particular 
excitement, it is carried above the level of its 
ordinary unfolding, it becomes luminous in 
this sense — that it throws a light before re- 
flection upon the path of reflection. Before 
thought it guides thought, so that, all the 
way through life, we find that there is this 
intermingling on the part of superior or- 
ganizations or on the part of ordinary or- 
ganizations in their superior moments — rev- 
130 



What Is Moral Intuition? 

elations made to them. The lower forms 
of mind are simply receptive. The inter- 
mediate state of mind is simply that of lower 
creation; the higher conditions of our mind 
are luminous conditions ; exhortations, 
promises, spring out of them, foresights 
spring out of them. Take the ordinary case 
of music. A man who has in him the genius 
of music, standing in the midst of an orches- 
tra of one hundred performers, discerns dis- 
cord — a half tone, or discord even less — and 
he not only sees it in the vast measure and 
movement of various instruments, and in the 
progress of the thought through sound he 
not only perceives it instantly, but he sees 
where it came from ; he knows the very in- 
strument that produced it. I might stand 
there years and never dream of it. A man 
has the artist's temperament, and he sees 
a picture by Titian just brought to light, 
and stands before it in almost adoration. 
*'Oh, what color ! \Miy, it seems to tiood 
the picture through and through !" A rude 
countryman coming in behind him stands 
and looks at it. "Wliy, I don't see no 
color! Why, I've got a picture at home 
twice as yaller as that and twice as red !" 
There are a great many such persons. It is 
said that ignorant people love strong color ; 
that is not the explanation. Ignorant people 
require strong colors before they see any 
color at all ; but the sensitive organization 
131 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

of the artist discerns the lowest tone and 
all the intermediate grades, the whole sched- 
ule of color. That which to a common man 
seems as if it was not very rude, to a sensi- 
tive and exquisitely loving nature is pain- 
ful to the last degree. It is the higher in- 
tuition, the higher judgment of the finer and 
the larger faculties of the mind or in the 
larger organizations — it is out of these that 
come what we call intuitions, and in the 
lower forms they pervade society. 'Men 
judge w^hether it is safe to trust a man by 
looking at him, and in that regard we dis- 
cern what is not discernible. ]\Iary says : 
''Now, John, I hope you are not going to 
do business with that man ; I don't like 
him." "Why, my dear, did you ever see 
him?'' ''Xo, I never did." "Well, how do 
you know anything about him?" 'T don't 
know, only I would not trust him, and I 
hope you won't trust him." ''Well, I shall 
trust him ;" and in about three months he 
comes back, and some night says, in rather 
a modest and crestfallen way: "Well, ]\Iary, 
you were right about that man." "John, I 
knew I was right !" Well, she had the per- 
ception — I suppose everybody has an at- 
mosphere — chemistry has not analyzed that 
question yet; but a pure and sensitive wo- 
man standing within the atmosphere of a 
rude, deceitful, or coarse man feels the 
atmosphere of him. Now, moral intuitions 
132 



What Is Moral Intuition? 



belong to that class of experience, so that 
there be many men that won't do things 
although everybody else thinks it right ; 
they won't, there is something in them that 
revolts at it. There are the high-toned and 
the common, and the low and the vulgar 
all the way up in every scale of every kind 
in human life. It is from this practical 
experience and teaching when we are young, 
coming to a state of mind in which we can 
apply a principle to courses of conduct and 
moral intuitions, the highest of all — it is 
from these sources that the intellect knows 
and teaches the emotion or conscience what 
is right and what is wrong. 

The next point that I wish to make is the 
fact, a subtle one, but a very important one, 
namely, the fact that conscience acts within 
the mind according to the law of companion- 
ship. A man is said to be known by the 
company he keeps. That is very true out- 
wardly, it is more true inwardly. A man's 
character is determined by the company that 
his faculties choose to keep. If you bisect 
a man and call the under part basilar, ani- 
mal, and the upper part social and moral, 
then the question of w^hich way your higher 
faculties tend determines very much the 
man's character. If, for example, a man has 
a constitutional mirthfulness, and it has by 
some way or other learned to love the com- 
panionship of the animal that is in man, you 
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Henry Ward Beecher. 

will see that his wit is vulgar; you will see 
him finding wit where only the phosphores- 
cent light of decay makes it shine. If a 
man has a conscience that w^orks toward 
fear, in partnership with fear, you will find 
it alw^ays either a timid conscience, or a 
cautious conscience, or a conscience that has 
bad company in the bottom of the brain, 
as it w^ere. If in the distribution of partner- 
ships that are formed wathin the mind you 
find men that have wit, and it w^orks in 
connection with combativeness and destruc- 
tiveness, it will be sarcastic, it wall be bitter, 
it wall be caustic, wdiereas, if mirthfulness 
w^orks in the direction of the imagination 
and of the intellect it wall be bright and 
cheerful and hopeful. If a man's conscience 
works with fear he becomes superstitious; 
if it w^orks with hope he shoots in the other 
direction continuously, and it is to the last 
degree of importance that men should know 
what the conscience is about inside of them. 
There be many men, we know that they are 
conscientious, but they are morose, they are 
ugly ; their conscience has got into bad com- 
pany, it is the animal in them that is inspir- 
ing it and directing it, and there be men, on 
the other hand, whose conscience is lumin- 
ous, and it works with benevolence and with 
hope, and they are radiant. Now, the 
world's history has shown more conscience 
in the direction of severity, in the direction 
134 



What Is Moral Intuition? 

of law, in the direction of wrath. The fact 
is that as the world has gone hitherto in its 
higher spheres, conscience has been a gladia- 
tor and a murderer, not because it was bad 
to have, but because it was bad to have in 
combination with the animal passions and 
faculties. Were there ever more conscien- 
tious men than the men that burned men, 
broke them on the wheel ; that everywhere 
turned this world through the profession of 
religion into an aceldama ? Conscience ! 
they had conscience enough, but it was a 
perverted conscience working with bad in- 
spirations from the lower elements in their 
nature, and so it comes to pass that men 
are all the time riding their consciences to 
the devil. There is hardly any strong man 
that has not got a conscience for w^hat he 
has to do. Multitudes of men backbite ; it is 
their 'Vluty" to do it. ^Multitudes of men 
there are that detract, multitudes of men 
that slander, multitudes of men that say, 'T 
have a conscience for the truth, the truth 
at all hazards they never seem to have 
read their Bible through. The Apostle says, 
''Speaking the truth in love," and the origi- 
nal is stronger than that — ''truthing it in 
love." But there be many men that truth 
it in bitterness, in envy, in revenge, in anger, 
and in all malice and uncharitableness. They 
have consciences — alas, yes — but they are 
like bulldogs sitting at the door of their 
135 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



souls, and snarling at every one who comes 
who does not belong to the family. 

I remark, further, every age is judged by 
its successors. The child is judged by 
the man, that is, the ripe judges the unripe. 
The infant race is judged by the developed 
race. Permissions and forbiddings increase 
with development. There are many things 
that an early race may do that a later race 
may not ; there are many things than an 
early race cannot do and that a later race 
can, and therefore is under obligation to do. 
There is no absolute law, it is always relative 
to knowledge and capacity, the line of recti- 
tude and of duty. Less animal power is 
permitted in the later developments, more 
moral power ; less liberty of the animal, 
more liberty of the reason and of the moral 
sense. Things are not right now, therefore, 
which were right once — right only in the 
sense that outlives. It is right for a child 
to walk pit-a-pat, but it would be absurd 
for a full-stretched man to do so. As the 
race develops they cannot do any better 
than they can, and' the law applied to races 
is the very law that we apply incessantly to 
the family. And it works humanely and 
wisely, and yet there is a strong impression 
that the further back you go into antiquity, 
primitive and simple man, the nearer you 
come to the right rules of life. That lies 
at the root of all Rousseau's nonsense and of 
136 



Evolution and Design. 



that school of which he is the genius. But 
it did not stop there. There are multitudes 
of men that think in regard to religion that 
the early saints were the nearest to heaven. 
There were some of them that were very 
near to heaven, but there are a good many 
early saints that would not be tolerated 
now. Relative to their conscience and their 
knowledge it may be said that they certainly 
had put forth an amount of right intention 
and of will power ; they had put forth an 
amount which did exalt them above their 
fellows ; but if they were brought into our 
time I know not what would become of 
them. 

EVOLUTION AND DESIGN. 
From ''Evolution and Religion:' 

It is said that evolution has shown one 
thing very clearly, namely, that the old doc- 
trines of the designs of God in the creation 
of this world are no longer tenable. ^Nlaybe 
not ; perhaps not. It used to be thought : 
"Why, here is a flower growing right up 
under the edge of a glacier. What a beau- 
tiful design of God to create a flower that 
should be adapted precisely to this situa- 
tion !" Whereas comes the Evolutionist, 
and says : ''Everything that was not adapted 
to it died out, and this is the only thing left, 
because it is adapted to its situation and cir- 
cumstances." No design in it, no evidence, 
137 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

and so, all through the whole round, things 
that live, live because they are adapted to 
their sourroundings or ''environment," as it 
is called, and they are thought to be evidence 
of design. I think they are, too, but not 
they alone. I hold that the evidence of de- 
sign is stronger from the standpoint of evo- 
lution than it was from the standpoint of 
special creation. It is not simply an evi- 
dence of design by the location of this and 
that and the other thing, by the combina- 
tions between nature and function and con- 
dition. Here is a vast system running 
through the ages, a system that has in gen- 
eral one single tendency, namely, the things 
that are poor go under, and the things that 
are better survive, and the better yet still 
overtop them and go on, and this has been 
going on through ages and running through 
vast spheres of dispensation, and all of them 
working together, and working harmoni- 
ously. Is there no evidence of design with 
regard to this vast system and its tenden- 
cies ? Here is a man standing in a factory 
and by great labor he makes a gunstock, and 
by and by a man invents a lathe w^hich turns 
out gunstocks, so that, while the other man 
can make one a day, this can make five hun- 
dred a day. I should like to know whether 
the evidence of skill and design in the man 
that could make one is not greater in the 
man that can make a machine that can make 
138 



Evolution and Prayer. 

five hundred. There is a carpet loom, a 
great power loom, and, when you stand be- 
fore it, you almost think the thing ought to 
vote, it looks so intelligent. Now, if you 
were to see an Oriental woman squatting 
upon the ground and making exquisite rugs, 
putting in bits here and there, thrusting in 
the shuttle once in a while and fixing it, by 
and by comes out, in glowing colors, a beau- 
tiful carpet, you say : "W^hat a magnificent 
design ! Of course, somebody did it." 
Now, suppose a man can make a machine 
that can do all this, is not that man a de- 
signer much greater than were these women 
who were making these individual rugs ? 
The man that can create the greater design 
that is involved in these inferior executions 
is a greater man than the one that can 
micrely do the inferior things. And the 
whole development of the method of God in 
the whole world, when it comes to be looked 
at from the higher point of view, is itself 
sublime evidence of design in the creation 
and in the continuance of this globe. 

EVOLUTION AND PRAYER. 
From ''Evolution and Religion.'' 

Well, the doctrine of evolution or the 
scientific doctrines that go with it is said to 
destroy Christian prayer. No, it does not. 
It leaves it just where it was. ''Well/' says 
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Henry Ward Beecher. 



man, ''do you suppose that God changes the 
whole economy of this world in answer to a 
man's prayer?" I do not, myself ; do you? 
People say the ''prayer of faith'' would in- 
dicate that it does. The "prayer of faith" is 
a very curious thing. In regard to medi- 
cine, it seems to affect everything ; people 
are cured of this, that, and the other thing 
on the "prayer of faith,'' but it stops short 
at surgery. When a man's leg is shot off, 
if the "prayer of faith'' could make another 
grow, I should be very much inclined to be- 
lieve in the doctrine ; but, where it is easy to 
have relation to the nervous constitutions 
of the men and the "prayer of faith" acts 
upon these nerve centers, I do not under- 
stand at all why natural causes should not 
produce many of the things that men call an 
answer directly to prayer. But I repudiate 
this whole view of prayer ; it is vulgar, sim- 
ply vulgar ! Why, suppose that you think 
of prayer, as many people do, as an omniv- 
orous begging — men going to God every 
day : "Give mje something ! give me some- 
thing ; give me something ; give me some- 
thing!" You find them at the corner of the 
street, crying and whining and holding 
out their hat, with a pernicious blandness, 
and you will find them in churches doing 
just the same thing to God, all the while 
praying for this and praying for that, 
and giving thanks for this and that. Now, 
140 



Evolution and Prayer. 



I do not object to a man's being grate- 
ful in a general way for the providence that 
supplies his wants ; but I say that this is the 
merest outskirts that it bears about as much 
relation to prayer as a man's body does to his 
soul and to his inward excellences. Well, 
suppose I should behold, or some one, at 
least, should behold, in a wealthy heiress his 
very ideal of companionship, and,, making 
advances, finds gradual recipience, and little 
by little he comes to look upon her as angels 
are looked upon — woe is that man that does 
not see an angel once in his life, however 
soon its flight may be taken — in the fresh- 
ness and exhilaration of a true love he feels 
that the very atmosphere is blessed : and the 
play of thought and emotion in her, it was 
as if he heard the very choirs of heaven. He 
stays to look and listen, and then he goes out 
and meets one of his companions, who says 
to him : ''I say, Jack, have you been to see 
her to-day?" ''I have." "Did she give 
you anything?'' "Xo." Well, suppose the 
man should say to him: "Is not she rich?'' 
''Of course, she is rich." "And you think 
she likes you, too, and you did not ask her 
for anything ! I'd have asked her ; I'd have 
got something worth having if I had been 
in your place." Xo, he would not ; he could 
not have got in his place ; he would have 
been spurned and rejected by the high- 
minded and noble woman. The intercourse 
141 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



of life is but the faintest emblem of what 
prayer means, the lifting of ourselves into 
the conscious presence of the Ideal and the 
Eternal, and the issuing of our highest and 
best thought, love, praise, longing, and ado- 
ration. These things are the higher con- 
ception of prayer, not a species of begging 
— "Give me something, give me something." 
We are not forbidden to put ourselves in 
prayer under the recognition of the general 
providence of God by which we are sup- 
ported — "Give us this day our daily bread 
but that is only one sentence in the whole 
prayer ; it is merely a recognition of our re- 
lations to God. The prayer that was ut- 
tered by Jesus, the prayer that is recorded 
anywhere by His apostles, is of a higher na- 
ture than that. I know that there has been a 
controversy upon this subject, and I think 
it to be a very contemptible controversy ; it 
has been proposed that we should start two 
hospitals, one of which may be a prayer-an- 
swering hospital, and the other should be a 
medical one according to the ordinary ap- 
plication of natural laws, as if that had any- 
thing to do with the real question. Can the 
soul mingle its thought and feeling with the 
Divine Soul ? The animal man cannot an- 
sw^er that, the spiritual man can ; and the 
testimony of men among themselves, the 
higher men in their higher moments, and 
with their higher faculties, is that prayer is 
142 



Evolution and Sin. 



possible ; the interchange of our feeling and 
life with the Divine life, intersphering ; this 
is not only profitable,, but beyond all other 
experience, ennobling. Science does not de- 
stroy prayer. 

EVOLUTION AND SIX. 
From ''Evolution and Religion,'' 

Xow I come a little nearer to a theological 
ground round about which there has been 
much controversy. Science does not de- 
stroy the doctrine of human sinfulness ; it 
explains it, it defines it. it throws a clearer 
light upon it. The old doctrine of sin, 
which, it seems to me, no man of moral feel- 
ing could allow himself to stand on for an 
hour, or a moment, was that the human race 
born of their progenitors fell with them, and 
that the curse of God rested upon the whole 
human posterity, and that, therefore, all 
men, by reason of their connection with 
Adam, are born without original righteous- 
ness, without true holiness, and without 
communion with God. They were born 
without righteousness and holiness and com- 
munion with God, and they were born with- 
out everything else, too ; they were born with 
feet that could not walk, and with hands 
that could not handle, and with eyes that 
could not see, and with ears that could not 
hear; they were born without arithmetic, 
143 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

without grammar; they were born without 
anything but potential power, with the ca- 
pacity to come to these things by the process 
of unfolding ; and, when men say the whole 
human family is born without righteousness, 
of course it is ; that is a thing that belongs 
to development and to conscious volition 
later on. Now, what is sin? How would 
it be defined from the standpoint of sense, if 
you accept the doctrine of evolution — that, if 
man was not actually developed from the 
animal, he was so near to him that he was 
substantially an animal in his savage state? 
But, admit for the moment that man was 
primarily an animal, born and developed 
from his congeners into a higher state ; that 
there was superinduced upon him a moral 
element, a spiritual element, a rational ele- 
ment. The animal man was first in order, 
and too often in strength, in the primitive 
day, in the early day of every man. And 
sin lies in the conflict between the upper 
and the under man. If you want to see the 
doctrine stated in its most cogent form, read 
the seventh chapter of Romans, where the 
conflict is not between a man before he is 
converted, and, after he is converted, but be- 
tween the man animal and the man moral 
and spiritual ; where he thinks the highest 
things, and would fain do the highest things, 
but is pulled down and dragged under per- 
petually by the forces of his animal body. 
144 



Evolution and Sin. 



Sin is the remainder, as it were, of the con- 
flict between man moral and spiritual and 
man animal and so far degraded. And this 
gives not simply a rational explanation that 
every man's reason can perceive ; but it takes 
away the idea from the administration of 
God that men were cursed in their birth 
without any fault of their own, and that they 
w^ere being punished throughout all ages in 
this world on account of a sin that they 
never committed. They have had no part 
nor lot in their great-forefather's temptation 
and fall, but they have had to have their 
dividend in that everlasting, increasing and 
ever-rolling damnation that came to them in 
consequence of it. Men do not believe it, 
and I honor them for it. And see what a 
difference it would make in the preacher, for 
now when he goes on preaching about the 
fall of Adam, and posterity all of them fall- 
ing with him, and that sin was the result of 
that great fall, men say : "Has not he fin- 
ished his sermon? he has been preaching 
now twenty-five minutes ?" You do not be- 
lieve it! But if a man stands before his 
congregation and says to them : "This is sin, 
the conflict between your lower nature and 
your higher, and you know what it is ; you 
know what you ought to do, and you know 
that the reason you do not do it is the animal 
temptations and seductions and downfall- 
ing." Men hang their heads and say, 'Tt is 
145 



Henry Ward Beecher 

so, it is so;" and you will have an audience 
with you, and they will believe you, w^hereas 
now you have an audience that do not be- 
lieve you. And the way out of it becomes 
rational. A man is to be born again; that 
is, his life is to pass in its strength from its 
under nature into its higher nature ; that is 
a potency given to a man by which he can 
change the point and emphasis in his own 
structure ; and whereas to-day he is influ- 
enced mainly by considerations of success 
and by his physical relations to men in the 
temptations that flow out of his past, it is 
possible for him to pass into that realm in 
which he shall be controlled by reason, by 
sense of morality, and, above all, by the as- 
pirations of his soul for purity, for obedi- 
ence, for worship, for love, which is the 
mother of them all. And, therefore, when 
you preach to a congregation, ''You are sin- 
ners,'' you do not need any proof ; the things 
that you w^ould you do not, and the things 
that you would not that you do ; you go out 
in the morning, purposing to be beneficent 
and rational, and reasonable, and come back 
every night, saying, "I lost my temper, and 
with my temper I lost my good sense ;" you 
go out in the morning, saying, ''I will be 
generous," and you come back at night, 
saying : ''I have been selfish and mean 
every night of a man's conscious ex- 
perience sits in judgment on the man's 
146 



American Go/* 



morning. Every man knows what the 
reahty of that truth is — the everlasting 
interplay between the under man and upper 
man, and every man lives, therefore, in the 
experience of the seventh chapter of 
Romans. And such a doctrine as this will 
not only convince men, but will guide them 
into a higher life and nobler purpose, better 
than the old historic theology of the 
mediaeval ages, the scholastic theology. 

AMERICAN ''go.'' 
From ''The Reign of the Common People." 

Xow, if you cross the sea to our own land, 
my own land, the land of my fathers, we 
shall find that there are influences tending to 
give power to the brain, alertness, quick- 
ness, to give to it also a wider scope and 
range than it has in the average of the labor- 
ing classes in Europe. Here and there are 
communities which, if transplanted on the 
other shore, will scarcely know^ that they 
were not born and brought up there ; but 
this is not true of the great mass of the 
common people of all Europe. Our cli- 
mate is stimulating. Shipmasters tell me 
that they cannot drink in New York as they 
do in Liverpool. Heaven help Liverpool ! 
There is more oxygen in our air. It has 
some importance in this, that anything that 
gives acuteness, vivacity, spring, to the sub- 
147 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



stance of the brain prepares it for education 
and larger intelligence. A dull, watery, 
sluggish brain may do for a conservative ; 
but God never made them to be the fathers 
of progress. They are very useful as 
brakes on the wheel down hill ; but they 
never would draw anything up hill in the 
world. And yet, in the fanatic influence 
that tends to give vitality and quickness, 
force, and continuity to the human brain, 
lies the foundation for the higher style of 
manhood, and although it is not to be con- 
sidered as a primary and chief cause of 
smartness, if you will allow that word, yet 
it is one among others. And then, when 
the child is born on the other side, he is born 
into an atmosphere of expectation. He is 
not out of the cradle before he learns that 
he has got to earn his own living; he is 
hereditarily inspired with the idea of money. 
Sometimes, when I see babies in the cradle 
apparently pawing the air, I think that they 
are making change in their own minds of 
future bargains. But this has great force as 
an educating element in early childhood : 
''You will be poor if you do not exert your- 
self and at every future stage it lies with 
each man what his condition in society is 
to be. 

This becomes a very powerful developer 
of the cerebral mass, and from it comes in- 
telligence and power of intellect. And then, 
148 



American " Go/' 

upside of that, when he goes into life the 
whole style of society tends toward intense 
cerebral excitability. For instance, as to 
business, I find in London that you may go 
down at nine o'clock and there is nobody in 
the office, at ten o'clock the clerks are there, 
at eleven o'clock some persons do begin to 
appear. By that time the Yankees have got 
half through the day. And it is in excess ; 
it is carried to a fault ; for men there are 
ridden by two demons. They desire exces- 
sive property — I do not know that they are 
much distinguished from their ancestors — 
they desire more than enough for the uses 
of the family, and when a man wants more 
money than he can use, he wants too much. 
But they have the ambition of property, 
w^hich is accursed, or should be. Property 
may be used in large masses to develop 
property, and co-ordinated estates may do 
work that single estates cannot do ; I am not, 
therefore, speaking of vast enterprises like 
railroads and factories. But the individual 
man thinks in the beginning, 'Tf I could only 
make myself worth a hundred thousand dol- 
lars, I should be willing to retire from busi- 
ness." Not a bit of it. A hundred thou- 
sand dollars is only an index of five hundre/J 
thousand ; and when he has come to five hun- 
dred thousand he is like Moses — and very 
unlike him — standing on the top of the 
mountain and looking over the promised 
149 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



land, and he says to himself : ''A milHon ! a 
million !" and a million draws another mil- 
lion, until at last he has more than he can 
use, more than is useful for him, and he 
won't give it away — not till after his death. 
That is cheap benevolence. Well, this is the 
first element of mistake among large classes 
of commercial life in America. 

The second is, they want it suddenly. 
They are not willing to say, 'Tor forty years 
I will lay gradually the foundations, and 
build the golden stores one above another." 
No ; they want grass lands. They want to 
win by gambling, for that is gambling when 
a man wants money without having given a 
fair equivalent for it. And so they press 
nature to her utmost limits till the very dis- 
eases of our land are changing; men are 
dropping dead with heart disease; men are 
dropping dead — it is paralysis ; men are 
dropping dead — it is Bright's disease. Ah ! 
it is the violence done to the brain by exces- 
sive industry, through excessive hours, and 
through excessive ambition, which is but 
another name for excessive avarice. 



150 



Essays. 



ESSAYS. 



A DISCOURSE OF FLOWERS. 

Happy is the man that loves flowers ! 
Happy, even if it be a love adulterated with 
vanity and strife. For human passions 
nestle in flower lovers too. Some employ 
their zeal chiefly in horticultural competi- 
tions, or in the ambition of floral shows. 
Others love flowers as curiosities, and 
search for novelties, for "sports," and vege- 
table monstrosities. We have been led 
through costly collections by men whose 
chief pleasure seemed to be in the effect 
which their treasures produced on others, 
not on themselves. Their love of flowers 
was only the love of being praised for hav- 
ing them. But there is a choice in vanities 
and ostentations. A contest of roses is bet- 
ter than of horses. We had rather be vain 
of the best tulip, dahlia, or ranunculus, than 
of the best shot. Of all fools, a floral fool 
deserves the eminence. 

But these aside, blessed be the man that 
really loves flowers ! — loves them for their 
own sakes, for their beauty, their associa- 
tions, the joy they have given, and always 
will give ; so that he would sit down among 
them as friends, and companions, if there 
153 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



was not another creature on earth to admire 
or praise them ! But such men need no 
blessing of mine. They are blessed of God ! 
Did He not make the world for such men? 
Are they not clearly the owners of the 
world, and the richest of all men ? 

It is the end of art to inoculate men with 
the love of nature. But those who have a 
passion for nature in the natural way, need 
no pictures nor galleries. Spring is their 
designer, and the whole year their artist. 

He who only does not appreciate floral 
beauty is to be pitied like any other man who 
is born imperfect. It is a misfortune not 
unlike blindness. But men who contempt- 
uously reject flowers as effeminate and un- 
worthy of manhood, reveal a certain coarse- 
ness. Wqvq flowers fit to eat or drink, were 
they stimulative of passions, or could they 
be gambled with like stocks and public con- 
sciences, they would take them up just 
where finer minds would drop them, who 
love them as revelations of God's sense of 
beauty, as addressed to the taste, and to 
something finer and deeper than taste, to 
that power within us which spii itualizes 
matter, and communes with God through 
His work, and not for their paltr\ market 
value. 

]\Iany persons lose all enjoyment of many 
flowers by indulging false associations. 
There be some who think that no weed can 
154 



A Discourse of Flowers. 



be of interest as a flower. But all flowers 
are weeds where they grow wildly and 
abundantly ; and somewhere our rarest flow- 
ers are somebody's commonest. Flowers 
growing in noisome places, in desolate cor- 
ners, upon rubbish, or rank desolation, be- 
come disagreeable by association. Road- 
side flowers, ineradicable, and hardly be- 
yond all discouragement, lose themselves 
from our sense of delicacy and protection. 
And, generally, there is a disposition to un- 
dervalue common flowers. There are few 
that will trouble themselves to examine, 
minutely, a blossom that they have seen and 
neglected from their childhood ; and yet if 
they would but question such flowers, and 
commune with them, they would often be 
surprised to find extreme beauty where it 
had long been overlooked. 

If a plant be uncouth, it has no attractions 
to us simply because it has been brought 
from the ends of the earth and is a ''great 
rarity if it has beauty, it is none the less, 
but a great deal more attractive to us, be- 
cause it is common. A very common 
flower adds generosity to beauty. It gives 
joy to the poor, the rude, and to the multi- 
tudes who could have no flowers were na- 
ture to charge a price for her blossoms. Is 
a cloud less beautiful, or a sea, or a moun- 
tain, because often seen, or seen by mil- 
lions ? 

155 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



At any rate, while we lose no fondness for 
eminent and accomplished flowers, we are 
conscious of a growing respect for the floral 
democratic throng. There is, for instance, 
the mullein, of but little beauty in each flow^- 
eret, but a brave plant, growing cheerfully 
and heartily out of abandoned soils, ruffling 
its root about with broad-palmed, generous, 
velvet leaves, and erecting therefrom a tow^- 
ering spire that always inclines us to stop 
for a kindly look. This fine plant is left, by 
most people, like a decayed old gentleman, 
to a good-natured pity. But in other coun- 
tries it is a flower, and called the ''Ameri- 
can velvet plant." 

We confess to a homely enthusiasm for 
clover — not the white clover, beloved of 
honey bees — but the red clover. It holds 
up its round, ruddy face and honest head 
with such rustic innocence ! Do you ever 
see it without thinking of a sound, sensible, 
country lass, sun-browned and fearless, as 
innocence always should be? We go 
through a field of red clover like Solomon 
in a garden of spices. 

There is the burdock, too, with its prickly 
rosettes, that has little beauty or value, ex- 
cept (like some kind, brown, good-natured 
nurses) as an amusement to children, wdio 
manufacture baskets, houses, and various 
marvelous utensils, of its burrs. The thistle 
is a prince. Let any man that has an eye 
156 



A Discourse of Flowers. 



for beauty take a view of the whole plant, 
and where will he see more expressive grace 
and symmetry ; and where is there a more 
kingly flower ? To be sure, there are sharp 
objections to it in a bouquet. Neither is it 
a safe neighbor to the farm, having a habit 
of scattering its seeds like a very heretic. 
But most gardeners feel toward a thistle as 
boys toward a snake ; and farmers, with 
more reason, dread it like a plague. But it 
is just as beautiful as if it were a universal 
favorite. 

What shall we say of mayweed, irrev- 
erently called dog-fennel by some? Its 
acrid juice, its heavy pungent odor, make it 
disagreeable; and being disagreeable, its 
enormous Malthusian propensities to in- 
crease render it hateful to damsels of white 
stockings, compelled to walk through it on 
dewy mornings. Arise, O scythe, and de- 
vour it ! 

The buttercup is a flower of our child- 
hood, and very brilliant in our eyes. Its 
strong color, seen afar off, often provoked 
its fate ; for through the mowing lot we went 
after it, regardless of orchard grass and 
herd grass, plucking down its long, slender 
stems crowned with golden chalices, until 
the father, covetous of hay, shouted to us : 
''Out of that grass ! out of that grass ! you 
rogue 

The first thing that defies the frost in 
157 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



spring is the chickweed. It will open its 
floral eye and look the thermometer in the 
face at 32 degrees ; it leads out the snow- 
drop and crocus. Its blossom is diminu- 
tive; and no wonder, for it begins so early 
in the season that it has little time to make 
much of itself. But, as a harbinger and 
herald, let it not be forgotten. 

You cannot forget, if you would, those 
golden kisses all over the cheeks of the 
meadow, queerly called dandelions. There 
are many greenhouse blossoms less pleasing 
to us than these. And we have reached 
through many a fence, since we were incar- 
cerated, like them, in a city, to pluck one of 
these yellow flower drops. Their passing 
away is more spiritual than their bloom. 
Nothing can be more airy and beautiful than 
the transparent seed-globe — a fairy dome of 
splendid architecture. 

As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, 
and valorous sunflowers, w^e shall never have 
a garden without them, both for their own 
sake, and for the sake of old-fashioned 
folks, who used to love them. Morning- 
glories — or, to call them by their city name, 
the convolvulus — need no praising. The 
vine, the leaf, the exquisite vase-formed 
flower, the delicate and various colors, wfll 
secure it from neglect while taste remains. 
Grape blossoms and mignonette do not ap- 
peal to the eye; and if they were selfish no 
158 



A Discourse of Flowers. 



man would care for them. Yet, because 
they pour their life out in fragrance they are 
always loved, and. like homely people with 
noble hearts, they seem beautiful by associa- 
tion. Nothing that produces constant 
pleasure in us can fail to seem beautiful. 
\Ve do not need to speak for that universal 
favorite — the rose I As a flower is the finest 
stroke of creation, so the rose is the happiest 
hit among flowers ! Yet, in the feast of ever- 
blooming roses, and of double roses, we are 
in danger of being perverted from a love of 
simplicity, as manifested in the wild, single 
rose. When a man can look upon the sim- 
ple, wild rose and feel no pleasure, his taste 
has been corrupted. 

But we must not neglect the blossoms of 
fruit trees. AVhat a great heart an apple 
tree must have I \\'hat generous work it 
makes of blossoming ! It is not content 
with a single bloom for each apple that is to 
be ; but a profusion, a prodigality of blossom 
there must be. The tree is but a huge bou- 
quet. It gives you twenty times as much as 
there is need for, and evidently because it 
loves to blossom. Wt will praise this vir- 
tuous tree. Xot beautiful in form, often 
clumpy, cragged, and rude ; but it is glorious 
in beauty w^hen efflorescent. Xor is it a 
beauty only at a distance and in the mass. 
Pluck down a twig and examine as closely 
as you will ; it will bear the nearest looking. 
159 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



The simplicity and purity of the white ex- 
panded flower, the half-open buds slightly 
blushed, the little pink-tipped buds unopen, 
crowding up together like rosy children 
around an elder brother or sister, can any- 
thing surpass it? Why here is a cluster 
more beautiful than any you can make up 
artificially, even if you select from the whole 
garden ! W ear this family of buds for my 
sake. It is all the better for being common. 
I love a flower that all may have; that be- 
longs to the whole, and not to a select and 
exclusive few. Common, forsooth ! a flower 
cannot be worn out by much looking at, as 
a road is by much travel. 

How one exhales and feels his childhood 
coming back to him, when, emerging from 
the hard and hateful city streets, he sees 
orchards and gardens in sheeted bloom — 
plum, cherry, pear, peach, and apple, waves 
and billows of blossoms rolling over the hill- 
sides, and down through the levels ! My 
heart runs riot. This is a kingdom of 
glory. The bees know it. Are the blos- 
soms singing, or is all this humming sound 
the music of bees ? The frivolous flies, that 
never seem to be thinking of anything, are 
rather sober and solemn here. Such a sight 
is equal to a sunset, which is but a blossom- 
ing of the clouds. 

W e love to fancy that a flower is the point 
of transition at which a material thing 
160 



A Discourse of Flowers. 



touches the immaterial ; it is the sentient 
vegetable soul. We ascribe dispositions to 
it ; we treat it as we would an innocent child. 
A stem or root has no suggestion of life. 
A leaf advances toward it ; and some leaves 
are as fine as flowers, and have, moreover, a 
grace of m.otion seldom had by flowers. 
Flowers have an expression of countenance 
as much as men or animals. Some seem to 
smile ; some have a sad expression ; some are 
pensive and diffident ; others again are plain, 
honest, and upright, like the broad-faced 
sunflower and the hollyhock. We find our- 
selves speaking of them as laughing, as gay 
and coquettish, as nodding and dancing. Xo 
man of sensibility ever spoke of a flower as 
he would of a fungus, a pebble, or a sponge. 
Indeed, they are more lifelike than many 
animals. We commune with flowers — we 
go to them if we are sad or glad ; but a toad, 
a worm, an insect, we repel, as if real life 
was not half so real as imaginary Hfe. What 
a pity flowers can utter no sound ! A sing- 
ing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring 
honeysuckle ! Oh, what a rare and exquis- 
ite miracle would these be ! 

When we hear melodious sounds — the 
wand among trees, the noise of a brook fall- 
ing down into a deep, leaf-covered cavity — 
birds' notes, especially at night; children's 
voices as you ride into a village at dusk, far 
from your long-absent home and quite 
161 



Henrv Ward Beecher. 



homesick : or a flute heard from out of a 
forest, a sih'er sound rising up among silver- 
lit leaves, into the moonlighted air ; or the 
low conversations of persons whom yoti 
love, that sit at the fire in the room where 
you are convalescing — when we think of 
these things we are apt to imagine that noth- 
ing is perfect that has not the gift of sound. 
But we change our mind when we dwell 
lovingly among flowers : for they are alwavs 
silent. Sound is never associated with 
them. They speak to vou. but it is as the 
eye speaks, by vibrations of light and not of 
air. 

It is with flowers as with friends. IManv 
may be loved, but few much loved. Wdld 
hone}"suckles in the wood, laurel bushes in 
the very regality of bloom, are very beauti- 
ftil to you. But they are color and form only. 
They seem strangers to you. You have no 
memories reposed in them. They bring back 
nothing from time. They point to nothing 
in the future. But a wild brier starts a 
genial feeling. It is the country cousin of 
the rose ; and that has always been your pet. 
You have nursed it, and defended it : you 
have had it for companionship as you wrote : 
it has stood by yotir pillow while sick : it has 
brotight remembrance to you. and conveyed 
your kindest feelings to others. You re- 
member it as a mother's favorite : it speaks 
to you of your own childhood — that white 
162 



A Discourse of Flowers. 



rosebush that snowed, in the corner, by the 
door ; that generous bush that blushed red 
in the garden with a thousand flowers, 
whose gorgeousness was among the first 
things that drew your childish eye, and 
which always comes up before you when you 
speak of childhood. You remem.ber, too, 
that your mother loved roses. As you 
walked to church she plucked off a bud and 
gave you, which you carried because you 
were proud to do as she did. You remem- 
ber how, in the Hstening hour of sermon, her 
roses fell neglected on her lap — and how 
you slyly drew one and another of them ; 
and how, when she came to, she looked for 
them under her handkerchief, and on the 
floor, until, spying the ill-repressed glee of 
your face, she smiled such a look of love 
upon you as made a rose for ever after seem 
to you as if it smiled a mother's smile. And 
so a wild rose, a prairie rose, or a sweet- 
brier, that at evening fills the air with odor 
(a floral nightingale whose song is per- 
fume), greets you as a dear and intimate 
friend. You almost wish to get out, as you 
travel, and inquire after their health, and 
ask if they wish to send any messages by 
you to their town friends. 

But no flower can be so strange, or so 
new, that a friendliness does not spring up 
at once between you. You gather them up 
along your rambles ; and sit down to make 
163 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



their acquaintance on some shaded bank 
with your feet over the brook, where your 
shoes feed their vanity as in a mirror. You 
assort them ; you question their graces ; you 
enjoy their odor; you range them on the 
grass in a row and look from one to another ; 
you gather them up, and study a fit grada- 
tion of colors, and search for new specimens 
to fill the degrees between too violent ex- 
tremes. All the while, and it is a long while, 
if the day be gracious and leisure ample, 
various suggestions and analogies of life are 
darting in and out of your mind. This 
flower is like some friend; another reminds 
you of mignonette and mignonette always 
makes you think of such a garden and man- 
sion where it enacted some memorable part ; 
and that flower conveys some strange and 
unexpected resemblance to certain events of 
society ; this one is a bold soldier ; that one is 
a sweet lady dear — the white flowering 
bloodroot, trooping up by the side of a de- 
caying log, recalls to your fancy a band of 
white-bannered knights ; and so your pleased 
attention strays through a thousand vagaries 
of fancy, or memory, or vaticinating hope. 

Yet, these are not home flowers. You 
did not plant them. You have not screened 
them. You have not watched their growth, 
plucked away voracious worms, or nibbling 
bugs ; you have not seen them in the same 
places year after year, children of your care 
164 



A Discourse of Flowers. 



and love. Around such there is an artificial 
Ufe, an associational beauty, a fragrance and 
grace of the atrections. that no wild flowers 
can have. 

It is a matter of gratitude that this finest 
gift of Providence is the most profusely 
given. Flowers cannot be monopolized. 
The poor can have them as much as the rich. 
It does not require such an education to love 
and appreciate them, as it would to admire a 
picture of Turner's, or a statue of Thorwald- 
sen's. And, as they are messengers of af- 
fection, tokens of remembrance, and pres- 
ents of beauty, of universal acceptance, it is 
pleasant to think that all men recognize a 
brief brotherhood in them. It is not im- 
pertinent to oflfer flowers to a stranger. The 
poorest child can proft'er them to the richest. 
A hundred persons turned together into a 
meadow full of flowers would be drawn to- 
gether in a transient brotherhood. 

It is affecting to see how serviceable flow- 
ers often are to the necessities of the poor. 
If they bring their little floral gift to you, it 
cannot but touch your heart to think that 
their grateful aft'ection longed to express it- 
self as much as yours. You have books, or 
gems, or services, that you can render as you 
will. The poor can give but little, and do 
but little. Were it not for flowers they 
would be shut out from those exquisite 
pleasures which spring from such gifts. I 
165 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



never take one from a child, or from the 
poor, that I do not thank God in their be- 
half for flowers ! 

And then, when death enters a poor man's 
house ! It may be the child was the only 
creature that loved the unbefriended father 
— really loved him ; loved him utterly. Or, 
it may be, it is an only son, and his mother a 
widow — who, in all his sickness, felt the lim- 
itation of her poverty for her darling's sake 
as she never had for her own ; and did what 
she could, but not what she would, had there 
been wealth. The coffin is pine. The 
undertaker sold it with a jerk of indifference 
and haste, lest he should lose the selling of a 
rosewood coffin, trimmed with splendid sil- 
ver screws. The room is small. The at- 
tendant neighbors are few. The shroud is 
coarse. Oh, the darling child was fit for 
whatever was m.ost excellent, and the heart 
aches to do for him whatever could be done 
that should speak love. It takes money for 
fine linen ; money for costly sepulture. But 
flowers, thank God, the poorest may have. 
So, put white buds in the hair, and honey- 
dew, and mignonette, and half-blown roses 
on the breast. If it be spring, a few white 
violets will do ; and there is not a month till 
November that will not give you something. 
But if it is winter, and you have no single 
pot of roses, then I fear your darling must be 
166 



Trouting. 



buried without a flower; for flowers cost 
money in the winter ! 

And then, if you cannot give a stone to 
mark his burial place, a rose may stand 
there; and from it you may, every spring, 
pluck a bud for your bosom, as the child was 
broken off from you. And if it brings tears 
for the past, you will not see the flowers 
fade and come again, and fade and come 
again, year by year, and not learn a lesson 
of the resurrection — when that which per- 
ished here shall revive again, never more to 
droop or to die. 

TROUTING. 

Where shall we go? Here is the More 
brook, the upper part running through 
bushy and wet meadows, but the lower part 
flowing transparently over the gravel, 
through the pasture grounds near the edge 
of the village. With great ingenuity, it 
curves and winds and ties itself into bow- 
knots. It sets out with an intention of flow- 
ing toward the south. But it lingers on its 
errand to coquette with each point of the 
compass, and changes its mind, at length, 
just in time to rush eastward into the 
Housatonic. It is a charming brook to catch 
trout in, when you catch them ; but they are 
mostly caught. Nevertheless, there are 
here in Salisbury, as in every village, those 
mysterious men who are in league with fish, 
167 



Henry Ward Beecher 



and can catch them by scores when no one 
else can get a nibble. It is peculiarly satis- 
factory to one's feelings to have waded, 
watched, and fished with worm, grasshop- 
per, and fly, for half a day, for one poor fee- 
ble little trout and four dace, and at evening 
to fall in with a merry negro, who informs 
you, with a concealed mirth in his eye, and 
a most patronizing kindness, that he has 
been to the same brook and has caught three 
dozen trout, several of them weighing half 
a pound ! We will not try that stream 
to-day. 

Well, there is the Candy brook. We will 
look at that. A man might walk through 
the meadows and not suspect its existence, 
unless through the grass he first stepped into 
it ! The grass meets over the top of it, and 
quite hides it through the first meadow ; and 
below, through that iron-tinctured marsh- 
land, it expands only a little, growing open- 
hearted by degrees across a narrow field ; 
and then it runs for the thickets — and he 
that takes fish among those alders will cer- 
tainly earn them. Yet, for its length, it is 
not a bad brook. The trout are not numer- 
ous, nor large, nor especially fine ; but every 
one you catch renews your surprise that you 
should catch any in such a ribbon of a brook. 

It is the upper part of the brook that is 
most remarkable, where it flows through 
mowing meadows, a mere slit, scarcely a 
168 



Trouting. 



foot wide, and so shut in by grass, that at 
two steps' distance you cannot tell where it 
flows, though your ear hears the low, sweet 
gurgle of its waters down some pet water- 
fall. Who ever dreamed of fishing in the 
grass? Yet, as you cautiously spy out an 
opening between the redtop and foxtail, to 
let your hook through, you seem to yourself 
very much like a man fishing in an orchard. 
One would almost as soon think of casting 
his line into a haymow, or of trying for a 
fish behind winrows or haycocks in a 
meadow ! Yet, if the wind is only still, so 
that the line shall hang plumb down, we can, 
by some dexterity, drop the bait between 
grass, leaves, and spikes of aquatic flowers. 
No sooner does it touch the invisible water 
than the line cuts open the grass and rushes 
through weeds, borne ofif by your speckled 
victim. 

Still further north is another stream, 
something larger, and much better or worse 
according to your luck. It is easy of ac- 
cess, and quite unpretending. There is a bit 
of a pond, some twenty feet in diameter, 
from which it flows ; and in that there are 
five or six half-pound trout, who seem to 
have retired from active life and given them- 
selves to meditation in this liquid convent. 
They were very tempting, but quite un- 
temptable. Standing afar oflf, we selected 
an irresistible fly, and with long line we 
169 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



sent it pat into the very place. It fell like a 
snowflake. No trout should have hesitated 
a moment. The morsel was delicious. The 
nimblest of them should have flashed through 
the water, broke the surface, and with a 
graceful but decisive curve plunged down- 
ward, carrying the insect with him. Then 
we should, in our turn, very cheerfully, lend 
him a hand, relieve him of his prey, and, ad- 
miring his beauty but pitying his untimely 
fate, bury him in the basket. But he wished 
no translation. We cast our fly again and 
again ; we drew it hither and thither ; we 
made it skip and wriggle ; we let it fall plash 
like a blundering bug or fluttering moth; 
and our placid spectators calmly beheld our 
feats, as if all this skill was a mere exercise 
for their amusement, and their whole duty 
consisted in looking on and preserving order. 

Next, w^e tried ground bait, and sent our 
vermicular hook down to their very sides. 
With judicious gravity they parted, and 
slowly sailed toward the root of an old tree 
on the side of the pool. Again, changing 
place, we will make an ambassador of a 
grasshopper. Laying down our rod, we 
prepare to catch the grasshopper. That is 
in itself no slight feat. At the first step you 
take, at least forty bolt out and tumble head- 
long into the grass ; some cling to the stems, 
some are creeping under the leaves, and not 
one seems to be within reach. You step 
170 



Trouting. 

again; another flight takes place, and you. 
eve them with fierce penetration, as if 
thereby you could catch some one of them 
with your eye. You cannot, though. You 
brush the grass with your foot again. 
Another hundred snap out and tumble about 
in every direction. There are large ones 
and small ones, and middling-sized ones ; 
there are gray and hard old fellows : yellow 
and red ones ; green and striped ones. At 
length it is wonderful to see how populous 
the grass is. If you did not want them, they 
would jump into your very hand. But they 
know by your hooks that you are not a-fish- 
ing. You see a very nice young fellow 
climbing up a steeple stem, to get a good 
lookout and see where you are. You take 
good aim and grab at him. The stem you 
catch, but he has jumped a safe rod. Yon- 
der is another creeping among some deli- 
cate ferns. With broad palm you clutch 
him and all the neighboring herbage, too. 
Stealthily opening your little finger, you see 
his leg ; the next finger reveals more of him ; 
and opening the next you are just beginning 
to take him out with the other hand, when 
out he bounds and leaves you to renew your 
entomological pursuits ! Twice you snatch 
handfuls of grass and cautiously open your 
palm to find that you have only grass. It is 
quite vexatious. There are thousands of 
them here and there, climbing and wriggling 
171 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



on that blade, leaping off from that stalk, 
twisting and kicking on that vertical spider's 
web, jumping and bouncing about under 
your very nose, hitting you in your face, 
creeping on your shoes, or turning somer- 
sets and tracing every figure of parabola or 
ellipse in the air, and yet not one do you get. 
And there is such a heartiness and merri- 
ment in their sallies ! They are pert and 
gay, and do not take your intrusion in the 
least dudgeon. If any tender-hearted per- 
son ever wondered how a. humane man 
could bring himself to such a cruelty as the 
impaling of an insect, let him hunt for a 
grasshopper on a hot day among tall grass ; 
and w^hen at length he secures one, the affix- 
ing him upon the hook will be done without 
a single scruple, with judicial solemnity, and 
as a mere matter of penal justice. 

Now then, the trout are yonder. We 
swing our line to the air, and give it a gentle 
cast toward the desired spot, and a puff of 
south wind dexterously lodges it in the 
branch of the tree. You plainly see it strike, 
and whirl over and over, so that no gentle 
pull will loosen it. You draw it north and 
south, east and west; you give it a jerk up 
and a pull down ; you try a series of nimble 
twitches ; in vain you coax it in this way 
and solicit it in that. Then you stop and 
look a moment, first at the trout and then at 
your line. Was there ever anything so 
172 



Trouting. 



vexatious ? Would it be wrong to get 
angry? In fact you feel very much like it. 
The very things you wanted to catch, the 
grasshopper and the trout, yoti could not : 
but a tree, that yoti did not in the least want, 
you have caught fast at the first throw. 
You fear that the trout will be scared. You 
cautiously draw nigh and peep down. Yes, 
there they are, looking at you and laughing 
as sure as ever trout laughed I They under- 
stand the whole thing. With a very de- 
cisive jerk you snap your line, regain the 
remnant of it, and sit down to repair it. to 
put on another hook, you rise tip to catch 
another grasshopper, and move on down the 
stream to catch a trout ! 

]vleantin:e, the sun is wheeling behind 
the mountains, for you are just at the foot 
of the eastern ridge of ]\Iount Washington 
( not of the White ^lountains, but of the 
Taconic range in Connecticut). Already 
its broad shade begins to fall down upon the 
plain. The side of the mountain is solemn 
and sad. Its ridge stands sharp against a 
fire-bright horizon. Here and there a tree 
has escaped the ax of the charcoalers, and 
shaggily marks the sky. Through the heav- 
ens are slowly sailing continents of magnifi- 
cent fleece mountains — Alps and Andes of 
vapor. They, too, have their broad shad- 
ows. Upon yonder hill, far to the east of 
us, you see a cloud shadow making gray the 
173 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



top, while the base is radiant with the sun. 
Another cloud shadow is moving with 
stately grandeur along the valley of the 
Housatonic ; and, if you rise to a little emi- 
nence, you may see the brilliant landscape 
growing dull in the sudden obscuration on 
its forward line, and growing as suddenly 
bright upon its rear trace. How majes- 
tically that shadow travels up those steep 
and precipitous mountainsides ! How it 
scoops down the gorge and valley and 
moves along the plain ! 

But now the mountain shadow on the 
west is creeping down into the meadow. It 
has crossed the road where your horse 
stands hitched to the paling of a deserted lit- 
tle house. 

You forget your errand. You select a 
dry, tufty knoll, and, lying down, you gaze 
up into the sky. O ! those depths. Some- 
thing within you reaches out and yearns : 
you have a vague sense of infinity — of vast- 
ness — of the littleness of human life, and the 
sweetness and grandeur of divine life and of 
eternity. You people that vast ether. You 
stretch away through it and find that celes- 
tial city beyond, and therein dwell, oh, how 
many that are yours ! Tears come unbid- 
den. You begin to long for release. You 
pray. Was there ever a better closet? 
Under the shadow of the mountain, the 
heavens full of cloudy cohorts, like armies of 
174 



Farewell to the Country. 



horsemen and chariots, your soul is loosened 
from the narrow judgments of human life, 
and touched with a full sense of immor- 
tality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An 
hour goes past. How full has it been of 
feelings struggling to be thoughts, and of 
thoughts deliquescing into feeling. Twi- 
light is coming. You have miles to ride 
home. Xot a trout in your basket ! Xever 
mind, you have fished in the heavens, and 
taken great store of prey. Let them laugh 
at your empty basket. Take their raillery 
good-naturedly ; you have certainly had 
good luck. 

But we have not yet gone to the brook for 
which we started. That must be for 
another tramp. Perhaps one's experience 
of ''fancy tackle" and of fly-fishing might 
not be without some profit in moral analo- 
gies; perhaps a mountain stream and good 
luck in real trout may afford some easy side- 
thoughts not altogether unprofitable for a 
summer vacation. At any rate, it will make 
it plain that oftentimes the best part of trout 
fishing is not the fishing. 

FAREWELL TO THE COUNTRY. 

Salisbury, Coxx., Sept. i6, 1853. 
During two summers we have found a 
home in this hill country. We have ex- 
plored its localities in every direction. The 
175 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



outlines of its horizon, its peaks and head- 
lands, its mountains and gorges, its streams 
and valleys, have become famxiliar to us. It 
is a sad feeling that we have in going away. 

Nature makes so many overtures to those 
who love her, and stamps so many remem- 
brances of herself upon their affections, and 
draws forth to her bosom so much of our 
very self, that, at length, the fields, the hills, 
the trees, and the various waters, become a 
journal of our life. In riding over from 
Millerton to Salisbury (six miles), for the 
last time, probably for years, w^e could not 
but remark what a hold the face of the coun- 
try had got upon us. This round hill on the 
left, as we draw near the lakes, it is our hill ! 
Hundreds of times we have greeted it, and 
been greeted ; we have bounded over it ; in 
imagination we have built under those trees, 
and welcomed friends to our air cottage. 
How often, at sunset, have we looked forth, 
north, east, south and west, and harvested 
from each direction great stores of beauty 
and of joy. As we wound around its base, a 
three-quarter's moon shining full and 
bright, the two lakes began to appear in sil- 
ver spots through the trees. When we 
reached the summit of the road, they opened 
in full, and glimmered and shone like molten 
silver. For more beautiful sheets of w^ater, 
and more beautiful sites from which to look 
at them, one may search far without finding. 
176 



Farewell to the Country. 



During a few clays' absence the first frost 
has fallen. The reaper then has come ! 
And this is the sharp sickle whose un- 
whetted edge will cut all before it ! We 
had, before this, noticed the blood-red dog- 
wood in the forests, and a few vines that 
blushed at full length, with here and there a 
maple in swamp lands, that were prema- 
turely taking bright colors. But now all 
things will hasten. Two weeks, and less, will 
bring October. That is the painted month. 
Every green thing loves to die in bright col- 
ors. The vegetable cohorts march glowing 
out of the year in flaming dresses, as if to 
leave this earth were a triumph and not a 
sadness. It is never nature that is sad, but 
only we, that dare not look back on the past, 
and that have not its prophesy of the future 
in our bosoms. ]\Ien will sit down beneath 
the shower of golden leaves that every puff 
of wind will soon cast down in field and for- 
est, and remember the days of first summer 
and the vigor of young leaves ; will mark the 
boughs growing bare, and the increasing 
spaces among the thickest trees, through 
which the heavens every day do more and 
more appear, as their leaves grow fewer and 
none spring again to repair the waste — and 
sigh that the summer passeth and the win- 
ter cometh. How many suggestions of his 
own life and decay will one find ! 

But there is as much of life in autumn as 
177 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



of death, and as much of creation and of 
growth as of passing away. Every flower 
has left its house full of seeds. Xo leaf has 
dropped until a bud w^as born to it. 
Already, another year is hidden along the 
boughs ; another summer is secure among 
the declining flowxrs. Along the banks the 
green heart-shaped leaves of the violet tell 
me that it is all well at the root ; and in turn- 
ing the soil I find those spring beauties that 
died to be only sleeping. Heart, take cour- 
age ! What the heart has once owned and 
had, it shall never lose. There is resurrection 
hope not alone in the garden sepulchre of 
Christ. Every flower and every tree and 
every root are annual prophets sent to 
affirm the future and cheer the way. Thus, 
as birds, to teach their little ones to fly, do 
fly first themselves and show the way; and 
as guides, that would bring the timid to ven- 
ture into the dark-faced ford, do first go 
back and forth through it, so the year and 
all its mighty multitudes of growths walk in 
and out before us, to encourage our faith of 
life by death ; of decaying for the sake of 
better growth. Every seed and every bud 
whispers to us to secure, while the leaf is yet 
green, that germ which shall live when 
frosts have destroyed leaf and flower. 

Is there anything that the heart needs 
more than this ? Is there anything that can 
comfort the heart out of which dear ones 
178 



Farewell to the Country. 



have fled, as birds flying out of and forsak- 
ing the trees where they were wonted to sit 
and sing, but the assurance of their speedy 
recoming? They are not silent everywhere 
because they do not speak to us here. Their 
feet still walk, though no footfall may be in 
our houses. Thine, O death, was the fur- 
row ; we cast therein our precious seed. 
Now let us wait and see what God shall 
bring forth for us. A single leaf falls — the 
bud at its axil will shoot forth many leaves. 
The husbandman bargains with the year to 
give back a hundred grains for each one 
buried. Shall God be less generous? Yet, 
when we sow, our hearts think that beauty 
is gone out, that all is lost. But when God 
shall bring again to our eyes the hundred- 
fold beauty and sweetness of that w^hich we 
planted, how shall we shame over that dim 
faith, that having eyes saw not, and ears 
heard not, though all heaven and all the 
earth appeared and spake, to comfort those 
who mourn. And yet ! and yet ! — some- 
thing sinks heavily down and weighs the 
heart too hardly. The future is bright 
enough; but, the Xozc! 

This glorious vision, this hope and ever- 
lasting surety of the future, how shallow 
were life without it, and how deep beyond 
all fathoming with it ! The threads that 
broke in the loom here shall be taken up 
there. The veins of gold, that penetrate 
179 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



this mighty mountain of time and earth, 
shall then have forsaken the rock and dirt, 
and shine in a sevenfold purity. All those 
wrongly estranged and separated, and all 
v^ho, with great hearts, seeking good for 
men, do yet fall out and contend, and all 
they who bear about hearts of earnest pur- 
pose, longing to love and to do, but hin- 
dered and balked, and made to carry hidden 
fire in their souls that warms no one, but 
only burns the censer, and all they who are 
united for mutual discomfort, and all who 
are separated that should have walked to- 
gether, and all that inwardly or outwardly 
live in a dream all their days, longing for the 
dawn and the waking — to all such how 
blessed is the dawn of the resurrection ! The 
stone is rolled away, and angels sit upon it ; 
and all who go groping toward the grave to 
search for that which is lost, shall hear their 
voices teaching them that heaven harvests 
and keeps whatever of good the earth loses. 

But we began to write for the sake of say- 
ing farewell to old Salisbury and to all its 
beautiful scenery. The enjoyment which 
one receives in an eight-weeks' communion 
with such objects as abound here cannot be 
measured in words. We are not ashamed 
to acknowledge that our last ride through 
the familiar places was attended with an 
overflow of gratitude, as intelligent and dis- 
tinct as ever we experienced toward a living 
180 



Farewell to the Country. 

person. Why not ? Did not God create the 
heavens and the earth full of benefactions ? 
Did he not set forth all enchantments of 
morning and evening, all processes of the 
seasons, to be almoners of His own bounty ? 
God walks through the earth with ten thou- 
sand gifts which he finds no one willing to 
receive. Men live in poverty, in sadness 
and dissatisfaction, yearning and washing 
for joy, while above them and about them, 
upon the grandest scale, with variations be- 
yond record, are stores of pleasure beyond 
all exhaustion, and incapable of palling upon 
the taste. When our heart has dw^elt for a 
long time in these royalties, and has been 
made rich with a wealth that brings no care, 
nor burden, nor corruption, and that wastes 
only to burst forth with new treasures and 
sweeter surprises, we cannot forbear thanks- 
giving and gratitude w^hich fills the eye 
rather than moves the tongue. It is not 
alone thanks to God. By a natural process 
the mind gives sentient life to His messen- 
gers, and regards them as the cheerful and 
conscious stewards of divine mercy, and 
thanks them heartily for doing what God 
sent them to do. Nor can we forbear a 
sense of sorrow that that which was meant 
for so great a blessing to all men should 
be wasted, upon the greatest number of men, 
either because they lack education toward 
181 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



such things, or lack a sensibility which pro- 
duces enjoyment without an education. 

If there were an artist to come among us 
who could stand in ^Metropolitan Hall in the 
presence of a living assemblage, and work 
with such marvelous celerity and genius, 
that in a half hour there should glow from 
his canvas a gorgeous sunset, such as flushes 
the west in an October day ; and then, when 
the spectators had gazed their fill, should rub 
it hastily out, and overlay it, in a twenty 
minutes' work, with another picture, such as 
God paints rapidly after sunset — its silver 
white, its faint apple-green, its pink, its yel- 
low, its orange hues, imperceptibly mingling 
into grays and the black-blue of the upper 
arch of the heavens, to be rubbed out again, 
and succeeded by pictures of clouds — all, or 
any, of those extraordinary combinations of 
grandeur, in form and in color, that make 
one tremble to stand and look up ; these 
again to be followed by vivid portraitures of 
more calm atmospheric conditions of the 
heavens, without form or vapor ; and so on 
endlessly — such a man would be followed by 
eager crowds, his works lauded, and he 
called a god. He would be a god. Such is 
God. So he fills the heavens with pictures, 
strikes through them with effacement that 
he may find room for the expression of the 
endless riches of the divine ideas of beauty 
and majesty. "The heavens declare the 
182 



The Death of our Almanac. 



glory of God, and the firmament showeth 
His handiwork." The Psahiiist then boldly 
personifies days and nights, as if they were 
sentinels and spectators, each as it passes 
from his watch rehearsing what it had seen : 
"Day unto day uttereth speech, and night 
unto night showeth knowledge." 

We are thankful that our incarceration in 
the city, though it shuts out all these things, 
cannot efface the memory of a summer's 
happiness. That glows and lives again, 
and will be a sweet twilight on our path, till 
another season and another vacation. 

THE DEATH OF OUR ALMANAC. 
(1853.) 

He died without a groan. He seemed as 
vigorous, only the day before, as the first 
day of his life ; and held his own to the last 
moment. W^re it not that another child of 
the same family, bearing the same general 
features, and apparently of the same temper, 
is ready to take his place, we should be in- 
consolable. For, no other friend have we to 
whom we can go for advice, as we could to 
him. He was, doubtless, somewhat of an 
Oriental turn of mind, and spoke mostly in 
figures. Yet his knowledge in various 
things was not small and was exceedingly 
practical. He held converse with the stars, 
and seemed to know what was going on 
183 



Henry Ward Beecher 



among all the planets. He had a habit of 
looking after the sun, and had become so 
well acquainted with his favorite resorts 
that he could tell you what he would do and 
where he could be found for years to come. 
He knew all the coquetings of the sun and 
moon ; and all the seasons at which the stars 
would play bo-peep with each other ; and all 
the caprices of the moon, from her slyest 
glance to the fullest gaze of her maidenly 
face. 

Although his thoughts seemed much on 
high, he also had much earthly lore. He 
w^as particularly fond of looking after the 
tides; he kept a calendar of various events 
and days, and notched the whole year upon 
his table. 

Wt seldom took in hand an important 
matter without consulting him. We never 
found his judgment of events wrong. And 
now, his face and sides bear the miarks of 
our regard. 

These economical uses were but the ''ex- 
terior knowledges" of our departed friend. 
Nothing pleased him better than, on some 
winter night, to be drawn forth, and held 
before the glowing fire, and persuaded into 
a spiritual converse. How many discourses 
has he thus uttered ! Sometimes he would 
liken the year to human life, and draw the 
analogies of each month to corresponding 
periods in man's development and experi- 
184 



The Death of our Ahnanac. 



ence. At other times, he would divide the 
world's life into periods, and he always de- 
clared that the world was revolving through 
a vast year of its own — a period as long as 
the earth's whole existence — and that we 
were living the world's great month of 
]\Iarch — full of bluster and storm. You can 
no more know, said he once to us. the glory 
of the world as it shall be, from what it has 
been. than, from the scenes of February and 
]\Iarch, you can suspect the contents of June 
and October. 

On one occasion, our almanac seemed un- 
usually oracular. Laid on the shelf with 
several imaginative authors, he seemed to 
have felt their influence. 

We were sitting in our scarlet chair, our 
feet upborne upon another, and pointed 
toward the fire, like artillery. We passed 
into an "impressible" state. The wind was 
rattling the windows on the back of the 
house, and whistling wild tones through the 
crevices ; and, occasionally, we could hear 
the tide below rushing past the piers in the 
East River, and splashing sullenly against 
them. "Come," said we, "speak out. 
Under these names, January, February, 
^larch, April, how much is hid that the eye 
cannot see? Uncover the months and in- 
terpret them/' We touched the very chord. 
In a low and sweet way, he began to speak 
as if he were a harp, and as if the spirit of 
185 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



the year like a gentle wind was breathing 
through it. 

''January ! Darkness and light reign 
alike. Snow is on the ground. Cold is in 
the air. The winter is blossoming in frost 
flowers. Why is the ground hidden ? Why 
is the earth white ? So hath God wiped out 
the past ; so hath He spread the earth like an 
unwritten page, for a new year ! Old sounds 
are silent in the forest, and in the air. In- 
sects are dead, birds are gone, leaves have 
perished, and all the foundations of soil re- 
main. Upon this lies, white and tranquil, 
the emblem of newness and purity, the vir- 
gin robes of the yet unstained year ! 

''February ! The day gains upon the 
night. The strife of heat and cold is scarce 
begun. The winds that come from the 
desolate north wander through forests of 
frost-cracking boughs, and shout in the air 
the w^eird cries of the northern bergs and 
ice-resounding oceans. Yet, as the month 
wears on, the silent work begins, though 
storms rage. The earth is hidden yet, but 
not dead. The sun is drawing near. The 
storms cry out. But the sun is not heard in 
all the heavens. Yet he whispers words of 
deliverance into the ears of every sleeping 
seed and root that lies beneath the snow. 
The day opens, but the night shuts the earth 
with its frostlock. They strive together, but 
the darkness and the cold are growing 
186 



The Death of our Almanac. 

weaker. On some nights they forget to 
work. 

''March ! The conflict is more turbulent, 
but the victory is gained. The world 
awakes. There come voices from long-hid- 
den birds. The smell of the soil is in the 
air. The sullen ice retreating from open 
field, and all sunny places, has slunk to the 
north of every fence and rock. The knolls 
and banks that face the east or south sigh 
for release, and begin to lift up a thousand 
tiny palms. 

''April ! The singing month. Many 
voices of many birds call for resurrection 
over the graves of flowers, and they come 
forth. Go, see what they have lost. What 
have ice, and snow, and storm, done unto 
them? How did they fall into the earth, 
stripped and bare? How do they come 
forth opening and glorified ? Is it, then, so 
fearful a thing to lie in the grave ? 

In its wild career, shaking and scourged 
of storms through its orbit, the earth has 
scattered away no treasures. The hand 
that governs in April governed in January, 
You have not lost what God has only hid- 
den. You lose nothing in struggle, in trial, 
in bitter distress. If called to shed thy joys 
as trees their leaves ; if the afifections be 
driven back into the heart, as the life of flow- 
ers to their roots, yet be patient. Thou shalt 
lift up thy leaf-covered boughs again. Thou 
187 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



shalt shoot forth from thy roots new flow- 
ers. Be patient. Wait. AMien it is Feb- 
ruary, April is not far off. Secretly the 
plants love each other. 

"]\Iay ! Oh, flower month, perfect the har- 
vests of flowers ! Be not niggardly. 
Search out the cold and resentful nooks that 
refused the sun casting back its rays from 
disdainful ice, and plant flowers even there. 
There is goodness in the worst. There is 
warmth in the coldness. The silent, hope- 
ful, unbreathing sun, that will not fret or 
despond, but carries a placid brow through 
the unwrinkled heavens, at length conquers 
the very rocks, and lichens grow and incon- 
spicuoush^ blossom. What shall not time 
do, that carries in its bosom love ? 

"Jnne ! Rest ! This is the year's bower. 
Sit down within it. Wipe from thy brow 
the toil. The elements are thy servants. 
The dews bring thee jewels. The winds 
bring perfume. The earth shows thee all 
her treasure. The forests sing to thee. 
The air is all sweetness, as if all the angels of 
God had gone through it, bearing spices 
homeward. The storms are but as flocks of 
mighty birds that spread their wings and 
sing in the high heaven ! Speak to God now, 
and say, O Father, where art thou?' And 
out of every flower, and tree, and silver pool, 
and twined thicket, a voice will come, 'God 
is in me.' The earth cries to the heavens, 
188 



The Death of our Almanac. 



'God is here.' And the heavens cry to the 
earth, 'God is here.' The sea claims Him. 
The land hath Him. His footsteps are upon 
the deep ! He sitteth upon the circle of the 
earth ! 

"Oh, sunny joys of the sunny month, yet 
soft and temiperate, how soon will the eager 
months that come burning from the equator 
scorch you ! 

''July ! Rouse up ! The temperate heats 
that filled the air are raging forward to glow 
and overfill the earth with hotness. ]\Iust it 
be thus in everything, that June shall rush 
tow^ard August ? Or, is it not that there are 
deep and unreached places for whose sake 
the probing sun pierces down its glowing 
hands? There is a deeper work than June 
can perform. The earth shall drink of the 
heat before she knows her nature or her 
strength. Then shall she bring forth to the 
uttermost the treasures of her bosom. For, 
there are things hidden far down, and the 
deep things of life are not known till the fire 
reveals them. 

"August ! Reign, thou fire month ! 
What canst thou do? Neither shalt thou 
destroy the earth, whom frosts and ice could 
not destroy. The vines droop, the trees 
stagger, the broad-palmed leaves give thee 
their moisture, and hang dowm. But every 
night the dew pities them. Yet, there are 
flowers that look thee in the eye, fierce sun, 
189 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



all day long, and wink not. This is the re- 
joicing month for joyful insects. If our 
unselfish eye would behold it, it is the most 
populous and the happiest month. The 
herds plash in the sedge ; fish seek the 
deeper pools ; forest fowl lead out their 
young; the air is resonant of insect orches- 
tras, each one carrying his part in nature's 
grand harmony. August, thou art the ripe- 
ness of the year ? Thou art the glowing 
center of the circle ! 

"September! There are thoughts in thy 
heart of death. Thou art doing a secret 
work, and heaping up treasures for another 
year. The unborn infant-buds which thou 
art tending are more than all the living 
leaves. Thy robes are luxuriant, but worn 
with softened pride. ^lore dear, less beau- 
tiful than June, thou art the heart's month. 
Not till the heats of summer are gone, while 
all its growths remain, do we know the full- 
ness of life. Thy hands are stretched out, 
and clasp the glowing palm of August, and 
the fruit-smelling hand of October. Thou 
dividest them asunder, and art thyself 
molded of them both. 

"October ! Orchard of the year ! Bend 
thy boughs to the earth, redolent of glowing 
fruit ! Ripened seeds shake in their pods. 
Apples drop in the stillest hours. Leaves 
begin to let go when no wind is out. and 
swing in long waverings to the earth, which 
190 



The Death of our Almanac. 



thev touch without sound, and He looking 
up, till winds rake them, and heap them in 
fence corners. When the gales come 
through the trees, the yellow leaves trail, 
like sparks at night behind the flying engine. 
The woods are thinner, so that we can see 
the heavens plainer, as we lie dreaming on 
the yet warm moss by the singing spring. 
The days are calm. The nights are tranquil. 
The year's work is done. She walks in gor- 
geous apparel, looking upon her long labor, 
and her serene eye saith, Tt is good.' 

"November ! Patient watcher, thou art 
asking to lay down thy tasks. Life, to thee, 
now, is only' a task accomplished. In the 
nighttime thou liest down, and the messen- 
gers of winter deck thee with hoarfrosts for 
thy burial. The morning looks upon thy 
jewels, and they perish while it gazes. Wilt 
thou not come, O December? 

"December ! Silently the month ad- 
vances. There is nothing to destroy, but 
much to bury. Bury, then, thou snow, that 
slumberously fallest through the still air, the 
hedgerows of leaves ! ]y[uffle thy cold wool 
about the feet of shivering trees ! Bury all 
that the year hath known, and let thy bril- 
liant stars, that never shine as they do in thy 
frostiest nights, behold the work ! But 
know, O month of destruction, that in thy 
constellation is set that star, whose rising is 
the sign, forevermore, that there is life in 
191 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



death ! Thou art the month of resurrection. 
In thee the Christ came. Every star that 
looks down upon thy labor and toil of burial, 
knows that all things shall come forth again. 
Storms shall sob themselves to sleep. 
Silence shall find a voice. Death shall live, 
life shall rejoice, winter shall break forth 
and blossom into spring, spring shall put on 
her glorious apparel and be called summer. 
It is life ! it is life ! through the whole year !" 

We know not the temper of our almanac 
for 1854. As yet, it is taciturn. But we 
have hopes that in the loss of our old friend, 
now silent and laid to rest, we shall not be 
left without a companion, as wise, as genial, 
and as instructive. 

FROST IX THE WINDOW. 

Books have been written of painted win- 
dows, and journeys long and expensive 
have been made to see them. And without 
a doubt they are both curious and more than 
curious ; they are admirable. One such 
work of art, standing through generations of 
men, and making countless hearts glad with 
its beauty, is a treasure for which any com- 
munity may be grateful. 

But are we so destitute of decorated win- 
dows as, at first, one might suppose? Last 
night the thermometer sank nearly to zero, 
and see what business nature has had on 
192 



Frost in the Window. 



hand ! Every pane of glass is etched and 
figured as never [Moorish artist decorated 
Alhambra. Will you pass it unexamined, 
simply because it cost you nothing — because 
it is so common — because it is, this morning, 
the property of so many people — because it 
was wrought by nature and not by man ? 
Do not do so. Learn rather to enjoy it for 
its own elegance, and for God's sake, who 
gave to frosts such wondrous artist tend- 
encies. 

The children are wiser than their elders. 
They are already at the window interpreting 
these mysterious pictures. One has discov- 
ered a silent, solitary lake, extremely beau- 
tiful, among stately white cliffs. Another 
points out a forest of white fir trees and 
pines, growing in rugged grandeur. There 
are in succession discovered mountains, val- 
leys, cities of glorious structures, a little con- 
fused in their outline by distance. There 
are various beasts, too ; here a bear coming 
down to the water ; birds in flocks, or sitting 
voiceless and solitary. There are rivers 
flowing through plains, and elephants, and 
buffaloes, and herds of cattle. There are 
dogs and serpents, trees and horses, ships 
and men. Beside all these phantom crea- 
tures, there are shadowy ornaments of every 
degree of beauty, simple or complex, run- 
ning through the whole scale, from a mere 
193 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



dash of the artist's tool to the most studied 
and elaborate compositions. 

Neither does night repeat itself. Every 
window has its separate design. Every 
pane of glass is individual and peculiar. 
You see only one appearance of anxiety in 
the artist, and that is, lest time and room 
should fail for the expression of the endless 
imaginations which throng his fertile soul. 

There is a generous disregard of all fic- 
titious or natural distinctions of society in 
this beautiful working. The designs upon 
the poorhouse windows are just as exquisite 
as any upon the rich man's mansion. The 
little child's bedroom window is just as care- 
fully handled as the proudest window in any 
room of state. The church can boast of 
nothing better than the emblazonings on the 
window of the poor seamstress who live: 
just by. For a few hours everybody is 
rich. Every man owns pictures and galler- 
ies of pictures I 

But then comes the iconoclast— the sun 1 
Ah. remorseless eyes ! why will you gaze out 
all these exquisite figures and lines ? Art 
thou jealous lest night shall make sweeter 
flowers in winter time than thou canst in all 
the summer time? For shame, envious 
father of flowers ! There is no end of thy 
abundance. Around the equator the sum- 
mer never dies ; flowers perfume the whole 
ecliptic. And spreading out thence, the 
194 



Frost In the Window. 



summer shall travel northward, and for full 
eight months thou hast the temperate zones 
for thy gardens. \\'ill not all the flowers of 
the tropics and of eight-month zones suffice ? 
Will not all the myriads that hide under 
leaves, that climb up for air to treetops, that 
nestle in rock crevices, or sheet the open 
plains with wide efifulgence, that ruffle the 
rocks and cover out of sight all rude and 
homely things — suffice thy heart, that thou 
must come and rob from our winter canvas 
all the fine things, the rootless trees, the flow- 
ers that blossom without growing, the wil- 
derness of pale shrubberies that grow by 
night to die by day ? Rapacious sun ! thou 
shouldst set us a better example. 

But the indefatigable night repairs the 
desolation. Xew pictures supply the waste 
ones. Xew cathedrals there are, new for- 
ests, fringed and blossoming, new sceneries, 
and new races of extinct animals. We are 
rich every morning, and poor every noon. 
One day with us measures the space of two 
hundred years in kingdoms — a hundred 
years to build up, and a hundred years to 
decay and destroy ; twelve hours to over- 
spread the evanescent pane with glorious 
beauty, and twelve to extract and dissipate 
the pictures. 

How is the frost-picturing like fancy 
painting! Thus we fill the vagrant hours 
with innumerable designs, and paint visions 
195 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

upon the visionless sphere of time, which, 
with every revolution, destroys our work, 
restoring it back to the realm of waste fan- 
tasies ! 

But is not this a type of finer things than 
arrant fictions ? Is it not a mournful vision 
of many a virtuous youth, overlaid with 
every device of virtue which parental care 
could lay on, dissolved before the hot breath 
of love, blurred, and quite rubbed out? 

Or shall we read a lesson for a too un- 
practical mind, full of airy theories and 
dainty plans of exquisite good, that lie upon 
the surface of the mind, fair indeed, till 
touched ? The first attempt at realization is 
as when an artist tries to tool these frosted 
sketches ; the most exquisite touch of ripest 
skill would mar and destroy them ! 

Or, rather, shall w^e not reverently and re- 
joicingly behold in these morning pictures, 
wrought without color, and kissed upon the 
window by the cold lips of winter, another 
instance of that divine beneficence of beauty, 
which suffuses the heavens, clothes the 
earth, and royally decorates the months, and 
sends them forth through all hours, all sea- 
sons, all latitudes, to fill the earth with joy, 
pure as the Great Heart from which it had 
its birth? 



196 



TRUST. 

A child has an exalted idea of the knowl- 
edge and power of its parent. A father 
stands in a child's mind as the type of cour- 
age and capacity ; and a mother, of love and 
goodness. The feeling of trust is perfect. 
Children do not think about their own sup- 
port, or their own manifold wants. There 
is an inexhaustible certainty that everything 
will be thought of, sought, and procured by 
their parents for to-day, to-morrow, next 
week, the month, and the whole year. Xor 
does sickness or trouble diminish this feel- 
ing. It then grows even stronger. Trouble 
sends the child right home to the parental 
bosom. 

It is this experience that God employs to 
designate the relations of confidence and 
implicit trust that should exist between 
every human heart and Christ. The earthly 
parent succeeds very poorly in reproducing 
love, care, kindness, for-esight, providence. 
He is trying to do, on a small scale, in a 
narrow nature, in a sinful world, what God 
does gloriously, in an infinite sphere, with a 
perfect nature, and with transcendent excel- 
lence. God is unlike an earthly father, but 
it is on the side of excess, abundance, pro- 
fusion. He cares not less, but infinitely 
more, for every child, than any earthly 
197 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



parent ever can. He watches more will- 
ingly, provides more surely, gladly, and 
abundantly. 

But few Christians, however, reproduce 
the feeling of children toward a parent in re- 
spect to trust. They believe in God upon 
visible evidence. Prosperity makes them 
trustful. Trouble leaves them without a ray 
of quiet light. I\Ien trust in God when they 
are in health, in strength, when successful in 
their affairs, or when surrounded by all that 
heart can wish. When sick, alone, baffled 
in their business, vexed and troubled, 
hemmed in and shut up, they fall away from 
confidence, and go into despair. 

You can leave your aft'airs to God when 
they go well ; can you when they go ill ? 
You can rest quietly in God's hand when 
you are in health ; can you when sick ? You 
can trust your family with God when you 
are comfortable and happy ; can you when 
you are perplexed how to get along, and 
your children are sick, and long sick? 

But what is a trust in God good for that 
departs when you need it, and comes again 
only when you can get along without it? 
What is a ship good for that is safe in a 
harbor, but unsafe on the ocean? What is 
a sail good for that is sound in a calm, but 
spHts in the first wind? What patience is 
that w^hich only lasts when there is nothing 
to bear? Courage, when there is no 



Trust. 



danger ; firmness, where is no pressure ; 
hope when everything is before the eyes ; 
what are all these worth ? But such is the 
trust which most Christians have in God. 
It has no virtue in it. It is like a Hghthouse 
that burns only in daylight, and is extin- 
guished at sundown. 

We need a trust that shall take hold upon 
God with such a large belief of his love and 
constancy, as shall carry us right on over 
rough as well as over smooth ground ; right 
on through light and darkness ; right on 
through sickness, bereavement, loss, trouble, 
and long-pressing afflictions. At noon one 
does not need a torch. It is in darkness 
that one should carry a light. Sometimes 
God communicates his goodness to us 
through our worldly conditions. Every day 
and every hour seem mails from heaven 
bringing letters of divine remembrance and 
tokens of love. But, at other tim.es, God 
prefers other channels. He chooses to ap- 
proach us by other instruments. A Chris- 
tian should understand that every experi- 
ence contains the love and presence of 
Christ. God wears many robes. He comes 
in new apparel. W^hatever change takes 
place, it is only God in another dress. A 
Christian should learn to look at the face and 
not at the dress. If your father or your 
mother came to you, you would know them 
by the eye, by the mouth, by the expression, 
199 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

no matter how strangely they were dressed. 
We should feel mortified to find that a dear 
friend did not enough know us to carry the 
firm trust of friendship through all our 
moods and changes of appearance. 

It will be a help toward this state if every 
Christian will reckon with himself in a man- 
ner exactly the reverse of that usually prac- 
ticed. 

Count for nothing that which you feel in 
hours of glee or prosperity. Consider that 
only to be genuine trust in God which you 
have in hours of darkness. Begin there. 
Put your criterion and standard there. If 
you have none there, you have none at any 
time. 

''Although the figtree shall not blossom, 
neither shall fruit be in the vines ; the labor 
of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall 
yield no meat ; the flock shall be cut off from 
the fold, and there shall be no herd in the 
stalls; yet, will I rejoice in the Lord, I will 
joy in the God of my salvation.'' 

A RHAPSODY OF THE PEN UPON THE TONGUE. 

When St. James says, ''If any man oflPend 
not in word, the same is a perfect man, and 
able also to bridle the whole body," one is at 
first surprised. It would seem to place the 
sum of virtue in a very little thing. But a 
larger experience of life would change our 
200 



A Rhapsody of the Pen. 



opinion. The tongue is the exponent of the 
soul. It is the flame which it issues, as 
lightning is the tongue of the clouds. It is 
the sword of anger, the club of brutal 
rage, the sting of envy. It is the soul's 
right hand, by which it strikes with wast- 
ing power. On the other hand, the tongue 
is the soul's voice of mercy, the string 
on which its love vibrates as music; the 
pencil with which it fashions its fairest 
pictures ; the almoner of its gifts ; the mes- 
senger of its bounties ! 

By speech a man may touch human life 
within and vv^ithout. Xo sceptre has such 
power in a king's hand, as the soul hath 
in a ready tongue; which also has this ad- 
vantage, that well-uttered words never die, 
but go sounding on to the end of the world, 
not lost when seemingly silent, but rising 
and falling between the generations of men, 
as ships rise and fall between waves, hidden 
at times, but not sunken. A fit speech is like 
a sweet and favorite tune. Once struck out, 
it may be sung or played forever. It flies 
from man to man, and makes its nest in the 
heart as birds do in trees. This is remark- 
ably exemplified in maxims and proverbs. 
A generation of men by their experience 
prove some moral truth, and all know it as a 
matter of consciousness. By and by, some 
happy man puts the truth into words, and 
ten thousand people say, he got that from 
201 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

me ; for a proverb is a child born from ten 
thousand parents. Afterward the proverb 
has the Hberty of the world. A good 
proverb wears a crown and defies revolution 
or dethronement. It walks up and down 
the earth an invisible knight-errant, helping 
the needy. A man might frame and set 
loose a star to roll in its orbit, and yet not 
have done so memorable a thing before God 
as he who lets go a golden-orbed speech to 
roll through the generations of time. The 
tongue may be likened to an organ, which, 
though but one instrument, has within it an 
array of different pipes and stops, and dis- 
courses in innumerable combinations. If 
one man sits before it not skilled to control 
its powers, he shall make it but a monstrous 
jargon. But when one comes who knows its 
ways, and has control of its powers, then it 
becomes a mountain of melody, and another 
might well think he heard the city of God in 
the hour of its singing. The tongue is the 
keyboard of the soul. But it makes a world 
of difference who sits to play upon it. 
'Therewith bless we God, and therewith 
curse w^e men.'' It is sweeter than honey. 
It is bitterer than gall. It is balm and con- 
solation. It is sharper than a serpent's 
tooth. It is a wand that touches with hope, 
and lifts us up. It is a mace that beats us 
down, and leaves us wounded upon the 
ground. One trumpet, but how different 
202 



A Rhapsody of the Pen. 



the blasts blown upon it, by love, by joy, by 
humility, or by hatred, pride, anger ! 

A heart that is full of goodness, that 
loves and pities, that yearns to invest the 
richest of its mercy in the souls of those that 
need it — how sweet a tongue hath such a 
heart ! A flute sounded in a wood, in the 
stillness of evening, and rising up among 
leaves that are not stirred by the moonlight 
above, or by those m.urmuring sounds be- 
neath ; a clock, that sighs at half hours, and 
at the full hours beats its silver bell so 
gently, that we know not whence the sound 
comes, unless it falls through the air from 
heaven, with sounds as sweet as dewdrops 
make, in heaven, falling upon flowers ; a 
bird whom perfumes have intoxicated, sleep- 
ing in a blossomed tree, so that it speaks in 
its sleep with a note so soft that sound and 
sleep strive together, and neither conquer, 
but the sound rocks itself upon the bosom of 
sleep, each charming the other ; a brook that 
brings down the greeting of the mountains 
to the meadows, and sings a serenade all the 
way to the faces that watch themselves in 
its brightness, these, and a hundred like fig- 
ures, the imagination brings to liken there- 
unto the charms of a tongue which love 
plays upon. Even its silence is beautiful. 
Under a green tree we see the stream so 
clear that nothing is hidden to its bottom. 
We cast in round, white pebbles to hear 
203 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



them plash, and to see the crystal-eyed fish 
run in and sail out again. So there are 
some whose speaking is like the fall of 
jasper stones upon the silent river, and 
whose stillness follows speech, as silent fish 
that move like dreams beneath the un- 
troubled water ! 

It was in some such dreaming mood, me- 
thinks, old Solomon spoke : ''A wholesome 
tongue is a tree of life/' And what fruit 
grows thereon, he explains, when he after- 
ward says : ''A word fitly spoken is like 
apples of gold in baskets of silver" — beau- 
tiful whether seen through the silver net- 
work of the sides, or looked upon from 
above, resting their orbed ripeness upon the 
fretted edge of the silver bed. 

PURITY OF CHARACTER. 

Over the beauty of the plum and the apri- 
cot there grows a bloom and beauty more 
exquisite than the fruit itself — a soft, deli- 
cate plush that overspreads its blushing 
cheek. Now, if you strike your hand over 
that, and it is once gone, it is gone forever ; 
for it never grows but once. Take the 
flower that hangs in the morning, impearled 
with dew, arrayed as no queenly woman 
ever was arrayed with jewels. Once shake 
it, so that the beads roll off, and you may 
sprinkle water over it as carefully as you 
204 



Purity of Character. 



please, yet it can never be made again what 
it was when the dew fell silently upon it 
from heaven ! On a frosty morning you 
may see the panes of glass covered with 
landscapes — mountains, lakes, trees, blended 
in a beautiful, fantastic picture. Now, lay 
your hand upon the glass, and by the scratch 
of your finger, or by the warmth of your 
palm, all the delicate tracery will be obliter- 
ated ! So there is in youth a beauty and 
purity of character, which, when once 
touched and defiled, can never be restored ; 
a fringe more delicate than frostwork, and 
which, when torn and broken, will never be 
re-embroidered. A man who has spotted and 
soiled his moral garments in youth, though 
he may seek to make them white again, can 
never wholly do it, even were he to wash 
them with his tears. When a young man 
leaves his father's house, with the blessing 
of his mother's tears still wet upon his fore- 
head, if he once loses that early purity of 
character, it is a loss that he can never make 
whole again. Such is the consequence of 
crime. Its effect cannot be eradicated ; it 
can only be forgiven. It is a stain of blood 
that we can never make white, and which 
can be washed away only in the blood of 
Christ, that ''cleanseth from all sin 



205 



Henry Ward Beecher. 



HOW TO BEAR LITTLE TROUBLES. 

There is a kind of narrowness into which, 
in our everyday experiences, we are apt to 
fall, and against which we should most care- 
fully guard. When a man who is in per- 
fect health has a wound inflicted upon him — 
a wound in his foot, a cut on his finger, a 
pain in his hand — he is almost always sure 
to feel, even though it be only a small mem- 
ber that suffers, and the suffering itself be 
unworthy of the name, that the perfect 
soundness of all the rest of his body counts 
as nothing ; and a little annoyance is mag- 
nified into a universal pain. Only a single 
point may he hurt, and yet he feels himself 
clothed with uneasiness, or with a garment 
of torture. So, God may send ten thou- 
sand mercies upon us, but if there happen to 
be only one discomfort among them, one lit- 
tle worry, or fret, or bicker, all the mercies 
and all the comforts are forgotten, and 
count as nothing ! One little trouble is 
enough to set them all aside ! There may 
be an innumerable train of mercies which, 
if they were stopped one by one and ques- 
tioned, would seem like angels bearing God's 
gifts in their hands ! But we forget them 
all, in the remembrance of the most trivial 
inconvenience ! A man may go about all 
the day long — discontented, fretting, out of 
206 



How to Bear Little Troubles. 



humor — who, at evening, on asking himself 
the question, ''What has ailed me to-day r ' 
may be filled with shame because unable to 
tell. The annoyance is so small and slight 
that he cannot recognize it ; yet, its power 
over him is almost incredible. He is 
equally ashamed with the cause and the re- 
sult. 

We may fall into such a state merely 
through indifiference, and remain there sim- 
ply because we have fallen into it, and make 
no effort to get out. When a man starts 
wrong early in the morning, unless he is 
careful to set himself right before he has 
gone far, he will hardly be able to straighten 
out his crookedness until noon or after- 
noon — if haply then ; for a man is like a 
large ship ; he cannot turn round in a small 
space, and must make his sweep in a large 
curve. If we wake up with a heavenly 
mind, we are apt to carry it with us through 
the day ; but if we wake up with a fretful, 
peevish, discontented disposition, w^e are apt 
to carry that all the day, and all the next 
day, too ! I have comforted myself, and 
risen out of this state of mind by saying to 
myself : ''Well, you are in trouble ; some- 
thing has come upon you which is painful ; 
but will you let it clasp its arms around you, 
and shut you in its embrace from the sight 
and touch of all the many other things that 
are accounted joys? Will you suffer your- 
207 



Henry Ward Beecher. 

self to be harnessed and driven by it ?" It 
is well to remember that there is a way of 
overcoming present troubles by a recogni- 
tion of present or promised mercies. The 
apostle Paul knew this, and so exhorted us 
to ''look unto Jesus, who, for the joy that 
was set before Him, endured the cross, de- 
spising the shame." All that Christ had to 
bear he bore patiently — he carried his sor- 
row about with him as a very little thing. 
Why? Because of the ''joy that was set 
before Him Oh, let us apply the exhorta- 
tion faithfully to ourselves; and when we 
are worried, and tempted to give way to 
vexation, let us seek a sweet relief in the 
thought of the blessedness that is set before 
us to be an inheritance forever. 



THE END. 



208 



OCT 1? 1902 



